What caused the Titanic to sink?
Most people would say the iceberg. Fair enough, she was rather large and kind of put a hole in the ship.
But the reality was, a series of events - small mistakes, oversights - all contributed to the moment that the ship crashed into the iceberg, and Jack sank into the watery depths of the Atlantic. The lack of risk and incident management, appropriate planning, and adequate resources all contributed to the inevitable outcome: total disaster.
Incident management centres around identifying incidents, logging them, understanding exactly what happened and learning from them. Incident management is a life cycle process that feeds into itself. Historic incidents provide valuable learning that can be applied to future systems and protocols.
Streamlining your incident management process is the key to incident reduction and critical to keeping your people safe. Defining the roles each person holds, the channels of communication and establishing how things are done makes for a stronger safety culture.
These four elements of incident management are all critical pieces of the health and safety puzzle. Reviewing how you approach incident management within your organisation helps keep you prepared, resilient and informed about best practice. Here’s a quick refresher about key parts of incident management. Strip away the industry jargon, and remember the critical components of incident management. Stick to the basics, and keep your people at the heart of what you do.