What is an Incident Report Form Template and why is it important?
An incident report form template allows you to clearly document any event that may or may not have resulted in physical injury to an individual or damage to an asset.
It is a legal requirement that all incidents within the workplace are clearly recorded.
Therefore, to ensure the legality and compliance of your organisation it is essential you collect and file this data.
You can achieve this compliance with your own incident report form template.
The information collected using incident report forms are very useful as they can also be used to aid risk assessments and determine solutions to prevent the reoccurrence of potential future incidents.
How to create your own Incident Report Form Template
When planning your incident report form template you need to consider the specific information that you want to collect using said form.
Think carefully about all the data that is legally required when recording the occurrence of an incident.
When creating your incident report form template, you need to think about who will be filling it out and signing it off.
In our free example, we have a signature and date section for both the employee who reported the incident and their supervisor.
However, you may also wish to have a signature and date section for the employee/s who were involved within the incident and not just the who reported it.
It is critical to ensure traceability when incidents occur, and therefore you must always include a section that collects data about the individual filling in the incident report form template.
Ensure that you have sections to record who the incident was reported by, when it was reported and what type of incident occurred.
It is also important to have a section dedicated to the collection of the incident details specifically who was involved, the location and time and any witnesses that may have seen the event.
It is critical to record as much information within your incident report form template about the incident as possible.
This is both for legal reasons, and to help develop strategies to prevent the future reoccurrence of the incident.
You may also wish to include a section about medical treatment if any was necessary, including the name of the Dr or Hospital the employee visited.
It is important to record this in case an employee wishes to open a compensation case against your organisation.
Your incident report form template should also include a section that can be completed after an investigation.
This will allow you to collect data on what happened during the incident, what caused the incident, and identify any corrective actions that could be applied to prevent future reoccurrence.
