Area Leaders and Supervisors are responsible for ensuring incidents get reported as soon as possible by communicating the importance of doing so to the area members. Incidents with moderate or high loss potential must be investigated. An incident doesn’t need to cause an injury to warrant investigation. There is a great opportunity to investigate the near-misses to implement measures to ensure that they don’t cause more serious loss the next time. Area Leaders, Supervisors, health and safety committee members, or others trained can perform incident investigations. Managers of all levels are required to understand and sign the Incident Report and Investigation Form. The Human Resources Department will arrange this training.
Incident investigations are designed to find the root causes of an incident. Often remedial actions address the immediate causes, thereby fixing the symptom rather than the underlying problem. Standards may need to be reviewed. An incident investigation is a process to collect the facts and use them to analyze the incident and make recommendations. Through the process, it may be identified that certain procedures or rules were circumvented, and this has to be addressed appropriately with corrective or other remedial action.
Investigations are used to determine the root causes of incidents. The personal information on these records are confidential. The information with respect to the incident is not. Although they will not be kept in the manual, every opportunity to describe incidents, corrections made, and lessons learned should be afforded to staff and others potentially affected.
When a reportable injury occurs, the Workers Compensation Board (WCB) requires the following two forms to be completed and sent within 72 hours: Worker’s Report and Employer’s Report. The supervisor is responsible for ensuring they are completed and sent. Serious injuries, as defined by the WCB, must be reported to an officer as soon as reasonably practical. Near misses are not required to be reported to WCB. For further information, please review the UPEI Workers Compensation (WCB) and Incident Reporting and Investigation Policy.
The Supervisor is responsible for ensuring reporting and addressing the recommendations on the incident report and investigation form. There may be many considerations to evaluate in order to implement the most appropriate control, such as cost and efficacy.
