Incident Reporting
Dear Colleagues,
Welcome to your March newsletter. For this month’s update, I wanted to celebrate our colleagues who dealt with a serious incident at one of our customers sites and discuss the importance of completing and filing incident reports.
Suicide prevented at Middlesex University campus
At the end of February, our colleagues at Middlesex University were made aware of an attempted suicide on campus. Sadly, suicide attempts are not uncommon with students, with 319 suicide related deaths on campuses recorded between 2017 and 2021.
Thanks to the entire team at the university, this person was saved, and the situation was managed and resolved quickly. I want to say thank you and well done to the team at the university for their management of the situation and completing the incident report to ensure the company were aware of what had occurred. This is essential for our learning as a business.
This incident is not the only one from our university customers and suicide can affect us at any of our customer locations and raises two issues I would like to discuss this month.
Training in suicide prevention and management
In this newsletter, Magda offers an additional training opportunity around suicide. Can I please ask that as many of you as possible access this training, to educate yourself and to assist our customers should an incident arise. It is vital that we can diffuse these situations, understand how to manage the public and people in the area, and are able to report the incident in a way that can help us, our customers, and others to prevent suicide when a situation occurs.
Incident Reporting
Incidents are a natural part of our job in security, with varying degrees of severity. Whether it is a trespasser on site, criminal damage, or the need to administer first aid or mental support, we are often faced with situations many other professions would never encounter.
As such, we are also morally and often legally required to keep a log of any incident that may occur on our customers property, or in your line of work. With a focus on the environment, and through necessity during the pandemic, we now have a paperless incident reporting system that allows for immediate reporting and keeps all records securely on the Corps Security system.
However, although this system makes reporting easier, it is still vitally important that you understand the requirements when completing an incident report.
Firstly, you will have completed the Incident Reporting & Escalation training when you joined the company. If this was some time ago, it might be worth revisiting to ensure you are completely aware of your incident reporting procedures and responsibilities.
Rather than go through all procedures, I want to focus on what incidents require escalation, by remind you how to categorise them on Smart Task.
Major incidents are those that cause disruption to a customer’s business, and complete interruption to the customer’s normal business routine.
This may include the following types of incidents:
- Death (including suicide)
- Fire
- Flood
- Explosion
- Chemical spill/exposure
- Collapse of a structure.
- Gas incident (release of gas)
- Terrorist incident
- Protest activity
- Serious criminal incident (break in/theft from site/damage to site)
Accident resulting in:
- Fracture
- Amputation
- Penetrating injury to the eye
- Crush injury
- Serious burn
- Loss of consciousness
Serious incidents are those incidents that cause interruptions to the customers business.
This may include the following type of incidents:
- Physical assault
- Threat involving a bladed instrument or a needle.
- Exposure to a virus/blood borne infection (COVID-19, hepatitis B, hepatitis C or HIV)
- Attempted suicide
- Release of a fire suppressant system
- Bomb threat
- Vehicle accident
- Building evacuation
- Contact with illegal immigrants (vehicle carrying people)
- Data breach
- Loss of time to staff.
- Damage to a customer’s property, including building fabrics and chattels (non-criminal damage)
Minor Incident are any other incidents affecting Corps personnel or customer’s staff, and causing minor business disruption, should be denoted as a minor incident.
Examples of a minor incident could be, but not limited to,
- A minor first aid incident
- Dealing with an argumentative member
- Vehicle damage
With that in mind, do you think you have been reporting your incidents correctly? If you had been part of the team with the suicide attempt, would you have reported it correctly?
If you would like some refresher training on reporting incidents, please speak to your line manager who will be happy to arrange this for you.
Remember, no incident is too small to report.
Best wishes,
Paul