What is an Incident Management Process and why is it Important?
An incident management process defines the steps required by your organisation to successfully investigate and respond to any unexpected incidents in the workplace.
An effective incident management process will help minimise the impact of any unexpected incidents and prevent the occurrence of accidents as your organisation will be better prepared to deal with them.
A successful incident management process will enable you to thoroughly determine why the incident occurred and allow you to effectively apply corrective or preventive action to prevent the incident from reoccurring in the future.
Incident management is both a legal requirement and also a requirement of ISO Standard compliance see ISO 45001:2018 Clause 10.2 Incident, nonconformity and corrective action.
How to Create your own Incident Management Process
When planning your incident management process, you first need to determine the objectives you want to achieve using this process.
For an incident management process, the goal is to successfully investigate and respond to any unexpected incidents within the workplace and prevent their reoccurrence in the future.
Next you will want to consider the beginning and endpoints of your incident management process.
For example, our free template which you can download below begins with logging the incident and ends with recording the outcome of the corrective or preventive action that has been applied.
Once the beginning and endpoints have been established you can now begin outlining the rest of the steps needed that will allow your process to move from start to finish.
Think about the steps an incident will go through within your organisation so that it can be correctly investigated and managed.
Don’t forget to identify which of your steps require conditional logic which will affect how your process is actioned through.
Now you can determine who will be involved in your incident management process. Consider the stakeholders involved, their specific responsibilities and the information they will require to efficiently carry out the task.
A single role may have a part on an array of different steps. Alternatively, multiple roles may have a part on a single step.
Our template uses roles such as ‘Investigation Team’ or ‘Resolution Team’. However, your organisation may use different names for these roles or have different departments involved within the management of incidents.
Once a clear plan has been established it is now time to design your management process template.
Cloud Based Incident Management System: Jomo247
Traditional methods could be used to create a stationary image of your process template.
However, we recommend utilising a cloud based incident management system like Jomo247. This allows you digitally design and automate your management process templates in the cloud.
With Jomo247 our cloud based incident management process designer incorporates customisable roles making it straightforward for you to control who is involved in each step of your incident management process.
Once you have completed your process template it is now time to implement it. Remember to keep a close eye on the performance of the new process in case changes are required.
Continual improvement of processes is critical to achieving compliance and ensuring your operations are running as efficiently as possible.
What is an Incident Report Form?
An incident report form allows you to clearly document the occurrence of any event that has exposed your employees and/or your assets to serious risk.
Recording the occurrence of incidents in the workplace is a legal requirement and critical to the compliance of your organisation therefore it is essential that you collect and document this data.
The data collected from incident report forms can also help you carry out future risk assessments and determine solutions to prevent the reoccurrence of similar incidents.
To download our free Incident Report Form and learn how to make your own click here.
