Author(s)

B. Freibott

Abstract

Most managers agree that protecting people and the environment is all about prevention. But with today’s tight budgets and cutbacks, the environmental and safety professions must choose wisely where to invest in prevention programs that will yield the best results. Knowing the details about your organization’s incident history is one key component to improving and maintaining low incident rates and their associated injuries, illnesses, and environmental releases. By regulation, most of us have to report our incidents in accordance with our region’s regulatory processes, and the Environment, Health, and Safety (EHS) management systems do that very nicely. However, positive gains in efficiency and lower costs are gained by going beyond compliance to a point where you are anticipating and intervening with any negative trends that a proactive modern EHS management system can help identify. Beyond environmental incidents and accidents, the term \“incident management” implies that any observations about hazards or unsafe behaviors are reported and addressed before they become a costly incident. Modern incident management and its applied tools must address various stakeholders with different perspectives, and varying degrees of computer proficiency. All stakeholders must be intuitively comfortable with the solution and find it easy to use for their purposes. The process of incident management must also ensure that all data is provided, approved, and available for reporting. All corrective actions must be tracked, and escalations automatically delivered if they are overdue. A modern incident management system is the central communication platform that provides the right tools and the right information for all the involved people and stakeholders. Keywords: EHS management system, incident management, incident prevention,

Keywords

EHS management system, incident management, incident prevention,