Incident Report Templates

Every organization tries its best to ensure a happy and healthy workforce, however, incidents do occur, and it is best to be prepared for any situation, rather than being tangled up with an unexpected situation. Therefore, to help HR professionals in this situation, incident reporting was formulated. Incident reporting is an important practice that promotes safety in the workplace. Incident reports not only identify areas of improvement in an organization but also help you prevent accidents from occurring in the future. In this guide, we will discuss how to create incident reports and will also share some top incident report templates that will make things a lot easier for you.

Constructing an Incident Report With Templates

Having proper procedures in place for when an accident occurs at work can help prevent future accidents and ensure the incident gets recorded properly. Sometimes, incident reports are a legal requirement, so they are also important for remaining compliant with relevant laws. Therefore, you must know how to write an incident report and how to document events accurately.

What is an Incident Report?

An incident report is the formal documentation of specific details that describe the events of a workplace incident, such as an accident or injury. Its purpose is to discover the causes and events occurring in an accident or injury to prevent accidents in the future.

It is used to capture injuries and accidents, near misses, property and equipment damage, health and safety issues, security breaches, and misconduct on the work site. Employers might use the information in the reports to plan strategies and discuss risk mitigation efforts with HR professionals and other appropriate staff members.

How to Construct an Incident Report

An incident report is a systematic way of investigating incidents or events. However, to write any incident case reports, you must follow the basic format described below:

Take Immediate Action

It is the employees’ responsibility to notify their manager or another member of the organization’s leadership committee as soon as an incident occurs, regardless of the nature of the event. You need to educate your employees regarding communication channels so that your employees come forward in these situations and notify the concerned person promptly.

Once an incident has been reported, the member of leadership’s first responsibility is to ensure that appropriate treatment, if necessary, is being administered to those affected by the event. If the hazard still exists, the manager, to whom the event has been reported, must eliminate the hazard by controlling it. Each company should have a defined procedure for accomplishing this based on the nature of their work.

Collect the Facts

Once the immediate action has been conducted, it is time to determine and record the facts related to the incident details. There are nine facts related to the incident that you must include in your incident report:

Basics
Identify the specific location, time, and date of the incident. This information is fundamental to the investigation and the most important information to collect.

Affected Individuals
Collect details of those involved or affected by the incident. This would include recording the names of the individuals involved, their job titles, the departments they operate in, and the managers of those who were affected.

Witnesses
Speak to any witnesses of the event to collect their perspectives of the event. Record their statements as detailed and accurate as possible in the form. To ensure accuracy, it is advised to review your notes with the witness to ensure they agree with how the event is portrayed in the report.

Context
Consider and document the events that occurred, which ultimately led to the incident. It is important to identify which factors were an outcome of the incident and which factors were present before the incident and could be a potential contributing factor to the incident occurring.

Actions
In the report, you must specify the actions of those involved at the time of the incident. You must find out the exact reason for what the employee did that led to the incident.

Environment
Identify and record environmental conditions that contributed to the event.

Injuries
Record detailed descriptions of specific injuries and evaluate the severity of such in the report. This description should include parts of the body injured and the nature and extent of the injuries.

Treatment
It is also important to document in the incident case report the type of treatment administered for the acknowledged injuries. This information is important to document to understand how the employee recovers when reviewing the specifics of the event.

Damages
Record an account of any damage to equipment, materials, etc. that was affected by the incident. This will be helpful to refer back during the analysis of the event to consider both a corrective action plan and to determine what items will need to be repaired or replaced.

Analyze and Reflect

Collecting, recording, and analyzing the facts related to the occurrence of the incident will aid in determining how the incident occurred. It is essential to analyze the collected facts because it helps in developing an effective corrective action plan.

Establish a Corrective Action Plan

A corrective action plan would provide recommendations as a means to reduce the possibility of a continued issue and recurrence of the incident details. The recommendations would result from an effective analysis of the facts collected and documented in the incident report. Elements of an effective corrective action plan could include:

• Occupational Health & Safety training for employees.
• Preventative routine maintenance processes that ensure equipment is in proper working condition.
• A review of job practices and procedures with a recommendation for changes to reduce the risk of incidents.
• Conducting a job hazard analysis to determine if other potential hazards are associated with the task or environment, and then training employees on these hazards based on the findings of the assessment.
• Engineering, equipment, or PPE upgrades to ensure the task or the process of completing said task poses less risk.

Incident Report  Samples & Templates

Based on the type of workplace incident, you will need to include various pieces of information. Here is a template on how to write incident reports for the workplace:

Injury Incident Report Templates

“At [Time] on [Date], a worker, [Name], tripped over an electrical wire on the [Name of the Construction Site] construction site, located on [Place].

He was carrying a heavy object at the time. It is believed the wire should not have been laid across the ground without any safety tape securing it as nothing was drawing attention to it.

[Name] fell to the ground and dropped the hammer but did not injure himself. However, he twisted his ankle, which immediately began to swell, and scrapped the side of his leg in a minor way. A co-worker came to assist [Name] to his feet and helped him walk to a nearby bench. [Name] could not put his weight on his left foot, so he was taken to a nearby hospital.

Once at the hospital, doctors confirmed that [Name] sprained his foot, more specifically his ankle, and should keep his foot upright and elevated and gain support by crutches for two weeks. It would be hard for him to work during this period.

The construction site lead has assessed the wires on the ground and concluded that brightly colored tape should secure the cables to the floor to put attention to them and ensure that there are no problems in the wires that are easy to trip over so that this does not happen again.”

Sample Incident Form Template:

Dear [Name or All]

Hi, I am writing a report detailing [Incident] that happened on the [Date], at [Time]. [Injured Employee’s Name], one of the [Injured Employee’s Role] was [Detail the Incident]. According to the [Medical Professional], he obtained a [Injury] from the impact caused by the [Incident].

Upon further investigation and based on a note from one of the other employees who witnessed the incident, this might be a case of [Describe the Cause of the Incident]

This is taken into consideration and as a preventive measure, employees will be mandated to [Preventive Actions Taken to Reduce the Occurrence of the Incident].

Further details will be submitted if any additional information is acquired regarding this incident.

[Your Name],
[Your Role]

Conclusion

Incident reports generally cover a variety of situations that may vary based on their context and industry. Therefore, it is important to note that these templates can be changed based on the nature of the industry or incident!