Using Data to Manage Safety

Research on safety in the work environment indicates that data is the key challenge. Getting staff to report, getting clear, concise data, and being confident the data has integrity, that it has overall accuracy, and that it provides a complete picture of the situation are critical elements. 

Data commences with reporting and the challenges in establishing a reporting culture are many and significant:

• The perception that those involved will be blamed
• The perception that time taken to report is wasted time
• No acknowledgment if you report and no consequence if you don’t

Changing organisational culture requires leadership from the top and a clear and shared vision across the team of the purpose and value of the change. Generally, change can’t be achieved overnight. Cultural change needs to be incremental with the gains sustained over time.  

The incident reporting system itself can prove to be a barrier:

• where access to the system is limited, eg office based, or available to some users
• where the system is complex and not intuitive to use

Typically, the system that is the easiest to access and use will become the dominant system, which may not necessarily be the required system.

Structure follows strategy

Selecting the right system is critical in establishing a reporting culture.

Good systems will not only enable reporting but also support managers to respond to and manage the event. Requirements for safety are highly regulated. The system needs to be able to ensure the required ‘response protocols’ to an event are used consistently every time.

And managing the event may not be the end game. Taking the learnings from an event in order to reduce the chance of the same or similar event occurring again in the future is an invaluable resource.

Good incident management systems need to prompt and support an investigation of the underlying causes of an event and the analytics generated from the data needs to support trend reporting to enable emerging trends and patterns in the data to be identified.

The LogiqcQMS has been designed to meet these challenges.

Interested in seeing if the LogiqcQMS platform can strengthen your reporting culture, help your managers to respond and manage, and provide you with the analytics to support evidence-based decision making? Then book your free incident management demo today.