EHS Incident Management

EHS incident management refers to the people, procedures and workflows that record, analyze, and report on incidents, while implementing corrective actions to proactively minimize or mitigate future risk. An EHS incident is an unexpected event which results in (or has the potential to cause) damage, injury, or some form of disruption to your business.

EHS Incident Management is a key element of a commitment to continuous improvement of safety and compliance management programs. Every incident provides an opportunity to identify workplace hazards and to mitigate or remove the associated root cause and risks.

The Refined Data Incident Management Platform focusses on 5 key aspects of the incident reporting and incident data management:

Emergency Response

There are a small number of activities that must be taken care of when an emergency or an incident occurs at a facility:

• Report the incident.
• Notify the appropriate management teams and contractors.
• Capture photographs, videos, witness reports, details of injury and damage and other important notes.
• Follow the approved emergency response procedure for the specific type of emergency or incident.
• Collect accurate, verifiable details to support complete and consistent incident reporting.
• Minimize liability and costs associated with every incident.

In an ideal world, the first member of your property management team to arrive on scene uses their mobile phone to initiate the emergency response procedure with the click of one button. Everything else, including automated notifications to the Operations management team, EHS management team, insurance team, HR department and contractors is automated. Everyone involved is presented with a checklist to guide them through the response procedure for their role. From day one on the job, anyone on your team is able to initiate an incident report with confidence that help is coming and that they have a playbook for appropriately managing their response.

An incident is logged in the EHS management system and all responsible parties independently but collaboratively collecting complete and verifiable details of the incident.

Incident Data Management

A number of people are involved in responding to an incident, compiling incident reports, conducting root cause analyses, completing repairs, managing insurance claims, and assisting injured employees. Some of these key stakeholders could be hundreds or thousands of kilometres or miles from the scene of the incident. An important consideration in incident reporting workflows is how to most effectively collect a shared, consistently categorized, verifiable and secure set of data that fully describes each incident and is supported by by collaboration and communication tools.

The workforce collaboration element of an incident reporting system cannot be understated. Workflow tasks are a powerful and transparent way to verify that a distributed workforce never drops the ball on important incident reporting, corrective action or claims management tasks.

Health and Safety, Insurance and Human Resources

These 3 groups (health and safety, insurance and human resources) are primarily responsible for investigating each incident, minimizing potential liability, managing employee injuries, and minimizing the risk of future incidents by implementing suitable risk or hazard controls.

Once again, connecting the activities of these 3 groups with a secure, shared, actionable record of each incident report provides the most efficient and effective approach to incident management.

Benefits of Incident Management Programs

• Continuous improvement in EHS safety, compliance, hazard and risk management programs and procedures.
• Continuous improvement of EHS training programs for employees.
• Continuous improvement of preventative maintenance programs.
• Continuous improvement of site inspections and hazard assessments.
• Minimize and mitigate potential environmental risks.
• Minimize employee injuries and lost time at work.
• Reduce the number and cost of insurance claims.
• Reduced insurance premiums at time of renewal.

Incident Reporting Best Practices

• Create a corporate culture where incident reporting is embraced as a positive contribution to improving safety and to the financial bottom line of your company.
• Simplify the process of incident reporting for site teams. A mobile-first approach with minimal or no administrative overhead is the optimal approach to drive site team engagement and to ensure that every incident is reported.
• Focus on the coordination and communication of the distributed teams required to effectively manage every incident. Stakeholders include site management teams, contractors, regional managers, EHS management, insurance and claims management, human resources, legal, and other departments.
• Implement a digital information management system to consolidate, centralize, coordinate, manage and report on the extensive and complex information and workflows associated with every incident. Non-digital platforms are far less efficient, more prone to error, and are administratively cumbersome.
• Pay attention to information privacy laws and information security. Incident management requires the collection and long term storage of personally identifiable data, insurance claim details, and sensitive documents and reports.