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By: Brad Smith | Principal Consultant
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Reporting safety incidents in the workplace is essential to managing risk effectively and efficiently, but with the advent of the COVID-19 pandemic, the relationship between risk and incident has taken on a whole new dimension.
Accident and ill-health costs can be likened to an iceberg: costs which are recoverable are visible while those which aren't recoverable are hidden below the waterline, and are many times greater.
So while we’re all still getting our heads around incident reporting for a silent, unseen, and often asymptomatic virus, there are key lessons you can learn from our “eliminate early" risk mitigation approach to COVID-19 for all risk related incidents in the workplace.
Global pandemic aside, we know that underreporting small incidents or “near misses” increases risks and often leads to larger incidents, which can potentially be far more damaging in the long-term.
Anecdotally, we also know that many of our clients, who have had reasonably good incident reporting systems before coming to us, have seen significant increases in reported incidents since implementing our Camms.Risk incident reporting system.
This isn’t an indication of instant and unprecedented risk in their workplaces (or irresponsibility among staff), it simply shows that no matter how organised or embedded your health and safety systems are, many incidents - particularly those small but essential ones that management need to know about - often go unreported.
It’s clear that without the right tools in place to make it easy for staff to capture even the smallest incidents, many organisations are missing the little warning signs that, when undocumented or unaddressed, could eventually lead to more serious incidents with far greater consequences for your organisation.
In the U.K. alone, 1.4 million working people suffered from a work-related illness, while £15 billion estimated cost of injuries and ill health from current conditions was recorded according to the HSE.
It is clear that directly and indirectly, accidents reduce profitability, as these hidden costs come out of the company. In order to prevent tipping the iceberg and save lives, livelihoods, and billions of pounds in the process, it’s essential for organisations to ensure all incidents are reported, and not just the major ones. This means making incident, near miss, observation reporting and risk management more accessible, accountable, trackable and resolvable whilst sending a message that embeds risk into the corporate culture
Camms.Risk is an all-encompassing software solution that provides an integrated approach to governance, risk and compliance. Camms.Risk software includes an easy to use and implement incident reporting system that can report incidents and near misses as they happen, conduct investigations, determine the impact of incidents and monitor cases until they’ve been resolved.
Source: Health and Safety Executive
Brad Smith, Principal Consultant at Camms
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