A summary of incident reporting in the process industry

Abstract Accidents (resulting in injury, damage and other losses) can be prevented by acting on the information available from the reporting and analysis of incidents (including near-misses). The design and quality of a reporting system will determine its performance; however, with no standards and very little guidance from publicly available literature, how do companies handle incident reporting? This paper is a summary of the reporting systems of about a dozen companies from whom we have received copies of their report forms. It covers their contents and includes some details of the associated procedures. The main conclusion is that every form is different. The value of reports comes from how the information recorded is used. This depends on the quality of reporting and investigation, which will be determined by the safety management systems. No company covers everything mentioned in this paper. Some reports are more comprehensive than others, but we have yet to discover which factors give the best performance by actually preventing accidents. We suspect that more fundamental aspects of the company culture and general management will prove to have a very great effect that could result in a ‘good’ reporting system performing badly or vice versa.