Section 7 - Outcome 1 - 0-3pts
You are unlikely to have a system that documents safety incidents and lets you identify safety issues and develop prevention strategies.
Your responses indicate that you need to take immediate action to ensure that you have a documented system to report and investigate safety incidents and injuries. Your procedure must also include management review and reporting.
What you can do to improve:
Develop and implement a simple and effective incident reporting procedure
Involve your workers in developing a simple to use and effective incident reporting procedure. Your goal is to make it easy for your workers to report incidents and injuries and easy for you to investigate them.
When developing your procedure consider:
- What incidents, hazards or injuries are to be reported (e.g. unsafe equipment, chemical spills, injuries, near-misses etc.)?
- To whom will the incidents be reported? Make sure the nominated person is someone who has the authority to act upon the report such as a manger or senior person.
- How will incidents be reported? Make sure the procedure addresses how a worker will report issues and requires management to act upon the report and provide feedback to the reporting worker.
- Who will investigate the incident? It would be a good idea to nominate a person (perhaps a safety officer or manager with appropriate training) to coordinate investigations and to be ultimately responsible for them. Ideally the investigation should involve all relevant people including the reporting worker, their manager/supervisor and the nominated investigator.
- How will corrective actions be recorded and closed out? Minor incidents will usually involve simple and immediate fixes (although these should still be recorded) but more serious incidents will require more complex actions. It is important that these are recorded and responsibility for closing them out assigned.
- How will incidents, injuries and investigations be reported to senior management? Consider how often incidents will be reported and reviewed by senior management and what the mechanism is for the reports (e.g. a weekly or monthly meeting with managers/supervisors, a written report etc.).
As part of the process you need to create a register of all incidents, investigations and outcomes. This is generally a simple summary of incidents that can be accessed easily. Examples of incident registers can be found on the SafeWork SA website.
Use your incident reports and register to help you improve your workplace safety
Incident reports and their associated investigations are a good source of information on the health of your work health and safety systems and general workplace safety.
Whenever you are reviewing your safety systems or your workplace always consider incident reports as they can help you identify adverse trends and help drive improved safety.
Date printed: 16 Dec 2025
