Unfortunately I believe there is an increasing tendency in most industries to differentiate between different grades of accident ie lost time, minor etc and only make KPIs out of the more serious types. In my view this then encourages supervisors and managers to try to find ways of ignoring accidents just as you have described. I am fully in agreement with in the concept of putting a level of effort into an investigation that is commensurate with the seriousness of the consequences or potential consequences, that afterall is what reasonably practicable is all about but if we only make KPIs out of lost time or RIDDORs we miss a valuable opportunity to prevent accidents at source.

Unless you have accident reporting criteria your employees are entitled to report when they want.
I work on a requirement to report within 24hrs. If it's not obvious it's an accident its not unreasonable that its reported as a near miss. Employees who are off can report by phone. Reporting on return to work is a nonsense as the employee will have had the knowledge that there was an issue, be delaying remediual action and leaving somebody else open to having an accident.

Your metrics should include minor accidents but be careful. How you respond to an accident can determine the level of reporting. A heavy handed approach drives it underground and the first you know about the problem is when you get a lost time accident.

John

From personal experience in a local authority that had a peripatetic workforce, the key issues to address are:-
Effective communication of the requirement to report accidents within specified timescales-should be a part of induction training.

Depending upon the safety/organisation culture, it may be worth getting a record of this.
Also to make it clear that this not following the company policy on reporting of accidents at the earliest opportunity is a misconduct & can have disciplinary procedure consequences

Also to train/instruct effectively all those who are in the reporting chain about this. Most important is to link the accident reporting to your absence reporting system, including forms, capture of absence information by other means of communication with a specific question, "is your absence due to an accident at work/" My experience, for some of the genuine cases is that they wrongly assumed that when reporting the absence, the person at the other hand somehow knew it was due to an accident at work! or sometimes it could be their partner, relative etc reporting the absence.

Last, but not least, whether you need to use the carrot /stick or combination of both depends upon the saefty culture in your organisation.

Thanks guys, Gramsay & Jay, you both touch on training out the importance of reporting on time which again I agree with, we cover this on induction and also through refresher training.

Jay, your point about culture is a good one, and I feel this is perhaps closer to our problem, not just with employees reporting, but also through team leader/manager level when dealing with absence and response to late reports.

Thanks all for your comments, I feel better knowing we all seem to agree all accidents no matter what the reasons, or how late should be dealt with in the same way, with perhaps different outputs form the investigation.

In my last organisation, (large manufacturing site with 200+ employees), we went through a period when a number of accidents started to be reported several days or even weeks after the alleged incident with no witnesses.

Common theme was that the individuals concerned had poor attendance records and were either already in the disciplinary procedures for this or had been warned they faced it if their attendance did not improve.

If the absence was as a result of an accident, their attendance recorded would not be affected. Some would report their non-attendance as being due to an accident when ringing in on the first day, where as others did not mention an accident until their return to work interview, which in some cases was several weeks later.

We addressed this by updating the accident reporting policy and procedure, with the agreement of the trade union. In it, we stated that :-

- all employees had a duty under Section 7 of HASAWA to co-operate with the Company to enable it to comply with its legal duties.
- all accidents must be reported before leaving site at the end of the shift on which the accident happened.
- any accidents not reported in this time frame would not be considered a works accident, but would be logged
- any employees not reporting accidents within this timeframe will be considered to be in breach of Section 7 and could face disciplinary procedures

Some of you might think this a heavy handed approach, but it worked. It put an end to the issue and the feedback through the grape vine from the shop floor was actually positive, because it was felt that the individuals who had been involved with this were trying to play the system and that management had addressed it in a fair way.