How to Write an Incident Report That Holds Up

The incident reports that cause trouble are almost never written by someone careless. I have read enough of them to be confident of that. They are written in a hurry, on a form that asked the wrong questions, by a person who thought they were filling in an internal record.

They were not. An incident report is a document that may be read years afterwards by a regulator’s inspector, by an insurer assessing a claim, by a lawyer acting for an injured worker, and, at worst, by a coroner. In New South Wales a death that was violent or unnatural, or that resulted directly or indirectly from an accident or injury, is reportable to the coroner even where a long interval separates the injury from the death.¹ The notification and site duties that sit around the report are set out in Part 3 of the model Work Health and Safety Act, sections 35 to 39.²

Write every report as though one of those four people will read it. Sometimes one of them does.

What the Report Has to Contain.

A report holds up when a stranger can reconstruct the event from it without asking you a single question. That takes 11 things, and most forms collect about five of them.

• Who. Full name, job title, and the company each person works for, including contractors and labour hire. “Dave from the crane crew” is not an identification.
• When. The date and time of the incident, and separately of the report. The gap between the two is itself evidence, and somebody will ask about it.
• Where. Not the site name. The level, the grid reference, the room, the chainage, or the bay number.
• What happened, in order. A numbered sequence from the last normal moment to the point the scene was made safe. Sequence is what reports most often lose and what an investigator needs most.
• The immediate actions taken. Who stopped the work, who isolated the plant, who called the ambulance, and at what time.
• The injuries. Body part, side, and the nature of the injury in plain words.
• The treatment. First aid on site, a doctor, a hospital, or none, and given by whom.
• The witnesses. Names and contact details, and a short statement in each person’s own words, taken separately.
• The conditions. Light, weather, noise, surface, and what the task was. A report that does not mention it was raining has lost half its meaning.
• The plant and substances involved. Asset number, make, model, and the last inspection or service date. “The EWP” is not a plant record.
• The photographs. Covered further down, because most of them are taken badly.

In ComplyFlow an incident record opens with a short description, the incident date and time, the date reported, the site, and the incident type: hazard, near miss, injury or illness, property damage, environmental damage, security, or report only.³ Investigations and corrective actions attach to that same record, so the incident register holds the sequence and the follow-up together rather than across a form, an email thread, and somebody’s notebook.

Write Facts, Not Conclusions.

This is the section that decides whether the report survives being read by somebody hostile.

A fact is something a person saw, heard, or measured. A conclusion is a judgement about why it happened or who is responsible. Conclusions written in the first hour are usually wrong, because the evidence is not in yet, and they are the first thing a lawyer attacks. Worse, a conclusion makes every later finding look as though it was worked backwards from that first guess.

Four worked rewrites, of the four sentence shapes that cause the most trouble. The wording is illustrative, not taken from any real report:

• Instead of “Worker A did not follow the procedure”, write “Worker A was not wearing the harness issued at the toolbox talk on 14 August. The harness was found in the site shed at 10:40.”
• Instead of “The scaffold was unsafe”, write “The plank on the second lift was not secured at either end. It moved about 200 mm when stepped on.”
• Instead of “He was rushing to beat the rain”, write “The forecast issued at 06:00 gave rain from 11:00. The pour was scheduled to finish at 10:30.”
• Instead of “The incident was caused by poor housekeeping”, write “Offcuts and strapping were stacked across the walkway between the bench saw and the exit door, leaving about 400 mm of clear width.”

Every second version can be checked by a person who was not there. Every first version cannot be checked at all, and it names a culprit before anyone has looked.

Three habits carry most of the difference. Record what a person said as a direct quote attributed to them, never as your summary of what they meant. Cut every word that carries a judgement: unfortunately, obviously, luckily, carelessly. And never leave a field blank, because a blank reads as something that was removed; write “not known at the time of writing” and come back to it.

Write the Report the Same Day.

Two things change overnight, and neither of them comes back.

The first is memory. Ask somebody on Thursday what the wind was doing on Monday morning and you will get an answer; it simply will not be evidence. People reconstruct sequence in good faith from what they learn afterwards, and the reconstruction is what falls apart under questioning.

The second is the site. Where a notifiable incident has occurred, the person with management or control of the workplace must ensure, so far as is reasonably practicable, that the site is not disturbed until an inspector arrives, apart from prescribed reasons such as helping an injured person, removing a deceased person, making the site safe, or assisting police.⁴ That preservation is temporary. Once the site is released, the scaffold comes down, the plant goes back into service, and the offcuts are swept up. The version of the scene you can photograph today does not exist tomorrow.

That is the strongest argument for reporting from a phone at the point the incident happened rather than from a desk on Friday afternoon. The form is then in the same hands that are standing in front of the evidence.

The Duties That Sit Around the Report, and Are Not the Report.

Four separate obligations get confused with the report itself. Writing the report discharges none of them.

Notifying the regulator. A notifiable incident is reported to the regulator immediately. SafeWork NSW says to call 13 10 50, which is staffed 24 hours a day, and adds that you also notify your workers compensation insurer within 48 hours.⁵ The Queensland Government frames the same duty as notification immediately after becoming aware of the incident, by the fastest method available.⁶ That is a phone call, not a form completed later that afternoon.

Knowing which incidents are notifiable. Queensland’s list of a serious injury or illness runs from immediate treatment as an in-patient in a hospital through amputation, a serious head, eye, or burn injury, a spinal injury, the loss of a bodily function, and serious lacerations. A dangerous incident is notifiable even when nobody is hurt, and covers an uncontrolled escape of a substance, gas, or steam, an explosion or fire, an electric shock, a fall of plant from height, and a structural or excavation collapse.⁷ Our post on the difference between a recordable and a reportable incident works through where that line sits.

Keeping the record for at least 5 years. The Queensland Government states that a person conducting a business or undertaking must keep a record of each notifiable incident for at least 5 years from the date it was notified.⁶ Five years is longer than most people stay in a job, which is why the report has to make sense without you in the room.

Keeping a register of injuries. This is a separate obligation again, and it is not limited to notifiable incidents. SafeWork NSW requires a register recording the injured worker’s name, address, age, occupation, and industry, and the time, date, nature, and cause of the injury. It may be kept in writing or electronically, and there are penalties for not keeping one.⁸

One thing is worth building into the form itself. The person writing the report is often not the person who decides whether the regulator gets called, so in ComplyFlow the form can prompt the reporter to flag an incident as potentially notifiable, which restricts the record to a nominated security group and puts it in front of the people who make that call.⁹ A prompt at the moment of writing is worth more than a policy document nobody opens at 7pm.

The duties differ in detail between states, and the regulator you call in Perth is not the one you call in Brisbane. Your own regulator’s page is the authority on yours.

Photographs That Work as Evidence.

Most incident photographs are close-ups of the thing that broke, taken from 300 mm away, with nothing in the frame to say where it was. They prove very little.

Five habits make a photograph useful to somebody reading it in two years:

• Take the wide shot first, then a middle shot, then the close-up. The wide shot is what places the close-up in the world.
• Put something in the frame for scale: a tape, a glove, a boot, or a hard hat.
• Photograph what was working as well as what failed. The intact guard on the next machine along is evidence about the standard on the site.
• Caption each one with where it was taken from, which way it faces, and when. An uncaptioned photograph is a puzzle, and puzzles get interpreted by whoever is holding them.
• Attach them to the incident record, not to the phone of whoever took them. A photograph on a departed supervisor’s phone is not in evidence.

On a construction site with several subcontractors on the same deck, the photographs are often the only record that outlives everybody’s version of events.

What Happens After the Report Is Written.

A report nobody acts on is an archive of things that went wrong. SafeWork NSW puts the obligation plainly: record every incident in the register of injuries, investigate why the incident occurred, and then document the investigation, the outcome, the work changes or risk controls put in place as a result, and how those changes were communicated to workers.¹⁰ That last clause is the one most organisations skip.

The investigation asks a different question. The report says what happened; the investigation says why, and it is done properly only by people who understand the work, with the health and safety representative or the affected workers in it.

Corrective actions are where the loop closes, or does not. An action with no owner and no due date is not an action; it is a sentence in a document. In ComplyFlow a corrective action is assigned to a named staff member, who receives email and dashboard notifications, and it moves through open, in progress, partial, closed, or not required, so an action nobody has touched in six weeks is visible rather than buried.¹¹

The last step is the one that changes behaviour. Tell the people who reported the incident what changed because they did. Then put the new control on an inspection schedule, because a control that is never checked exists only in the report that proposed it.

The Report You Will Be Glad You Wrote.

Before you submit one, hand it to somebody who was not there and ask them to tell you what happened. If they can give you the sequence, name the plant, say who was hurt and what was done about it, and point to the photographs that show it, the report holds.

If they have to ask you a question to understand it, an inspector will ask the same question, and you will be answering it from memory in 18 months with the site long since cleaned up. That is the whole difference, and it is bought on the day by the person who writes it down properly while the scene is still in front of them.