Incidents & Near Misses

The Incidents & Near Misses register logs both incidents (something happened) and near misses (something almost happened) using the same form and the same investigation fields, distinguished only by an Incident Type field.

Near misses are the cheapest source of safety information an organisation has — they show where a control is failing before it actually causes harm, at no cost. Logging them in the same register as real incidents, with the same investigation rigor, means a near miss doesn't quietly disappear into a verbal report that goes nowhere.

Every record has a status — open, investigating, or closed — and severity — Low, Medium, or High. Investigation is captured as three free-text fields: why it happened, the corrective action taken, and how it was prevented from happening again. A record can also be flagged to trigger a Safe Work Procedure review.

The list page shows every incident/near miss with its date, type, severity and status, filterable and sortable by any of those, and supports CSV import/export (the list page's column headers, including "Trigger SWP review", map directly to import columns). The detail page shows the full investigation; create and edit forms share the same fields.

• Incident date — required.
• Incident type — required. Incident or Near miss.
• Description — required, up to 10,000 characters. What happened.
• Severity — required. Low, Medium, or High.
• Status — open, investigating, or closed.
• Why it happened — optional, up to 10,000 characters.
• Corrective action — optional, up to 10,000 characters. What was done in response.
• How prevented — optional, up to 10,000 characters. What will stop it happening again.
• Trigger SWP review — a checkbox, shown as a "Flagged for SWP review" badge on the detail page when set. This is an informational flag only: it does not link to a specific Safe Work Procedure record or change any procedure's status automatically — it's a signal to whoever manages the Safe Work Procedures register that this incident may mean a procedure needs re-review.

Saving validates the required fields (date, type, description, severity) before submitting. There is no separate "close investigation" action distinct from setting Status to closed directly.

An incident with Trigger SWP review set doesn't automatically do anything elsewhere in the product — someone managing Safe Work Procedures needs to notice the flag and act on it manually. If the incident relates to a specific assessed risk, consider also recording or updating the corresponding entry in the Hazard & Risk Register; the two registers aren't linked by a shared field, so that connection is made by whoever is doing the investigation, not by the system.

What's the difference between an incident and a near miss? Only the Incident Type field — both use identical investigation fields, so a near miss gets the same rigor as an incident that caused harm.

Can I bulk-import incidents? Yes — the list page supports CSV import/export; the CSV column headers match the field labels shown on the list page exactly, including "Trigger SWP review" (accepts "Yes"/anything else as false).