Incident register · near miss · CAPA
Incident and near miss register that closes the loop.
An incident and near miss register is the record of what went wrong, or nearly did, and what you changed so it does not happen again. Every client checklist, prequal portal and ISO 45001 auditor asks to see it. PolicySystem keeps the register in the same system as your WHS policy and links each entry to a corrective action (CAPA) with an owner and a due date. It is not a workers compensation claim system and it does not notify the regulator for you.
What to record
- Type: injury, illness, property damage, environmental, near miss, dangerous incident.
- Date, time, site and the client if it happened on their premises.
- People involved and witnesses, including contractors.
- What happened, in the words of the person who saw it.
- Injuries and treatment, including first aid only.
- Immediate actions taken on the day.
- Whether it is notifiable, and if so when and how the regulator was told.
- Root cause, once investigated. Not "worker error"; the condition that let it happen.
- Corrective actions raised, with owner, due date and verification.
From incident to corrective action
- Log the event within the shift. Late entries lose detail and look like cover-ups.
- Decide if it is notifiable. If yes, call the regulator first, then finish the entry.
- Investigate in proportion to the harm. A near miss gets ten minutes; a hospitalisation gets a proper root cause analysis.
- Raise one or more corrective actions in the CAPA register. Change the control, the procedure, the training or the equipment.
- Close each action when done, and record how you checked it worked.
- Bring the incident and its actions to the next toolbox talk and the next management review.
PolicySystem suggests corrective actions from the incident type and links them, so the chain from event to fix is visible when an assessor picks an entry and asks "show me what you did".
Why near misses matter more than they feel
A near miss is an incident with the injury removed. The cause is identical; only the luck differed. A register with twenty near misses and no injuries in a year is a sign of a crew that reports and a business that listens. A register with nothing in it for a year is read by assessors as a business where nobody reports. Make reporting easy, thank the person, and never discipline someone for reporting their own near miss.
Who asks to see the register
Prequal portals such as CM3, LinkSafe and Avetta ask for your incident procedure and often your incident statistics. Head contractors ask for lost time injury numbers with a tender. ISO 45001 auditors sample entries under clause 10.2 and follow them into the CAPA register. Regulators ask after a notifiable incident. Insurers ask at renewal. One register, kept live, answers all of them. It sits beside the hazardous chemicals register, the training register and the rest of the WHS management system.
What this is not
Not a workers compensation claim. Not a regulator notification service; you still call the regulator for notifiable incidents. Not an inspection or checklist app for site walks. Not a public liability claims system. It is the safety record of the company, under document control, with the corrective actions attached.
Where to next
WHS management system · WHS requirements · ISO 45001 checklist · Internal audit · Management review · CM3 pack
Common questions.
An incident is an event that caused injury, illness or damage. A near miss is an event that could have but did not: the ladder that slipped with nobody on it, the chemical splash that hit a sleeve. Both go on the register. Near misses are the cheap lessons; a business that records them has far fewer incidents to record.
Notifiable incidents: a death, a serious injury or illness (immediate inpatient treatment, amputation, serious head, eye, burn or spinal injury, loss of a bodily function, serious laceration, medical treatment within 48 hours of exposure to a substance), or a dangerous incident such as an uncontrolled spill, fire, explosion, electric shock, fall from height or structural collapse. Report immediately to your state regulator (WorkSafe Victoria in Victoria) and preserve the site.
No. Workers compensation claims go to your insurer on their forms and their timelines. The incident register is your safety record of what happened and what you did about it. The two overlap on the same event but serve different purposes. Keep both.
Corrective and preventive action. A corrective action fixes the cause of something that went wrong. A preventive action addresses a risk before it does. ISO 45001 clause 10.2 and ISO 9001 clause 10.2 both require corrective action with root cause, an owner, a due date and a check that it worked. The CAPA register is where those live.
Notifiable incident records must be kept for at least five years under the model WHS Regulations. Good practice keeps all incident and near miss records for the life of the system so trends and repeat causes stay visible. Your register is timestamped, so you never have to guess when something was logged.