Hi guys, A little help and guidance if you please. We have a accident and incident reporting procedure in place and also a policy in place. however it does not state a specific time frame for when these should be reported. I'm not bothered about the RIDDOR just the general accident and incident. as we seem to be going through a spate of delay before accident reports reach the production managers desk and then mine. I have thought about refresher training and tool box talks for more guidance but is there a general rule of thumb for these to be in, as we feel that 24hrs is to long a delay to be coming back into work to report something that we could believe did not even actually take place in work?

A couple of years ago we had this problem, however we now use the Prime on line reporting system throughout our business once all the training was delivered to the supervisors and managers we set a 12 hour time line for all incidents and accidents to be reported. This has worked well as within this time it allows the supervisor/manager to start an investigation as well as the Health and Safety team to assess the incident/accident and up grade the investigation if required.

We use an electronic system known as OSHENS to record hazards, near misses, accidents etc. On the back of the system we produced guidance with time lines for reporting safety events (we use the term safety event to encompass all types of incidents). As we are a Fire and Rescue Service the normal time frame for reporting is by the end of shift, but the expectation is that any safety event is reported as soon as possible. This allows the department to access the event/incident and determine what action if any may be required. This system works for us and has enabled us to investigate incidents within hours of them occurring. I would say that a partial solution to your problem could be to review your policy and look to include some time frames for reporting all/various different incidents. Of course the difficult bit will be to disseminate this information and get those responsible to adhere to the time frames in the policy. In tandem with some guidance, refresher training (being mindful of the content - positive message) and tool box talks I think that you can win them around and achieve the outcome you are looking for (may take a little bit of time, but with reinforcement...). The onus should be on management to ensure that time frames are adhered to as this is an organisational risk and should be managed accordingly. I do agree with you and in my opinion 24hours is too long a delay to report some incidents as valuable information/evidence can be lost in this time, which may lead to complications not only in the completion of an accident report, but also further down the line if civil action is taken/considered against the company/organisation.