In a perfect world, you’d never have to deal with an environmental health and safety incident. Unfortunately, even the best risk management and injury prevention plans are vulnerable to unforeseen circumstances and human error. Sometimes, no matter how hard you’ve worked to prevent it, something unfortunate can happen.
When things go wrong, you want to know that you can count on your safety incident tracking software to help you get to the root of the problem and take action to prevent another incident in the future.
Is Your EHS Software Ready?
In the event of an incident, you need to know that your environmental health and safety software is there for you. In order to prevent future incidents, you need to be able to report on the incident and track any trends in workplace accidents in order to identify areas for improvement.
It’s important that you have not only the facts as presented by the impacted employee(s) and any medical professionals who treated them, but also that witnesses can share what they saw from the outside. As such, you want safety incident tracking software that has the capability for anyone to submit a report, without having access to the more sensitive areas of the software suite.
Using a standardized software reporting tool allows you to not only have all of the facts at hand, but to have similar data sets from multiple incidents, allowing you to more easily identify common factors that may have contributed to workplace safety incidents.
Why Use Software?
The days of paper charts are behind us. EHS software allows you to remain organized, easily find reports as needed, and efficiently share incidents up the chain of command and with any involved regulatory agencies.
A good suite of safety incident tracking software should be customizable to your industry and your company’s specific requirements, allowing you to record all of the necessary data. It should allow you to not only record workplace accidents that resulted in injury, but also near-misses, property damage, and any other sort of issue that your company wishes to track.
With the ability to not only track incidents but also near-misses and potential incidents, software can help you identify key learning points where employees could be reminded of safety procedures and company policy. Catching a pattern of “almosts” can give you the chance to put preventative measures in place before a serious incident causes employee injury and lost productivity.
Conclusion
Employees can easily get complacent and distracted. Equipment can fail to perform as advertised. Environmental conditions can throw an element of chaos into the workplace. The world is full of unexpected complications that can lead to an EHS incident. You need to know that the best tools are at your disposal to help you track trends and watch out for potential pitfalls. Environmental health and safety software is your digital partner in this never-ending task to keep your organization empowered to prevent incidents and maintain a safe workplace.
