Critical Incident Management
Critical Incident Management by Steve Krile I have been designing systems to manage incident information
for 10 years now, and if there is one lesson for critical incident management I have learned, it is this: make sure
you know what you know. Often times, when we are dealing with the very real and raw emotions of an accident our
perceptions about what really happened becomes somewhat clouded. We are focused on getting the best possible
treatment for our friend and co-worker, securing the area, making sure no one else gets hurt, and all the other
immediate response activities that come as second nature to most of us. However, if we are ever going to truly prevent this from happening again we need to do a proper and thorough investigation. And for most of us, this comes as second-nature as well. But, let me pull the camera back a bit, and let’s look at the landscape from a little further out. What if we want to optimize our analysis of critical incident management? What if we want to know the most dangerous machine in our building? What if a product engineer asks us, “What is the history of injuries for this part we manufacture?”
There is only one way to really know what you know and that is through codes. You should code as much as you can to enhance your incident management. There are many things we could code about an incident – injury type, body part, body location, lost time, medical treatment, machine, location, and on and on. However I suggest there is one code more important than all of those other items. This code will determine whether you “count” this incident. This code will set a precedent for long-term trend analysis. This code was the basis for our Critical Incident Management system we started 10 years ago. That code is : Most Serious Result. The problem we were trying to solve was being able to compare the injury rates from plant in Kentucky, USA to the rates from a plant in Plymouth, England. With such vastly different governments mandating completely different standards for injury reporting, it was not possible to harmonize the two systems based on government requirements. And that’s just those two countries. What about France, Germany, the Czech Republic, India, and the rest of our operations all over the world? How were we supposed to get everyone reporting similar critical incidents in a similar (or to be more precise – exact) manner? What we developed was a coding system for result that would be applied across all of our operations regardless of jurisdiction or government. It would be *our* reporting standard. This standard became the corner-stone for our corporate Critical Incident Management system. No longer were we forced to parse the local laws of Wuhu, China to decide if an injury was reportable to the Chinese government and therefore should be counted. In the next article I will show you the codes we came up with and some of the challenges we had implementing this coding system.
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