The best incident is the one that never happens. However, sometimes things happen—a resident loses weightbearing in a transfer, an employee slips while mopping or a dog bites someone. When incidents happen, following the right sequence of events is critical to both preventing future incidents and properly managing any potential workers’ compensation claim.
First, stop the bleeding and stabilize the shock. Ensuring the injured employee is safe is the priority.
Second, tell management. Prompt reporting of injuries (reporting immediately after stopping the bleeding and stabilizing shock) is what allows you to gather the facts as they are at the time of the incident.
Third, gather facts. Gathering facts as close to the time of the incident as possible means you get closer to what actually happened. This means interviewing the injured employee about what happened, talking to any residents that were involved and talking with any other employees that might have seen or heard things. You may need to take photographs of the area or draw sketches to ensure the scene is captured adequately for later analysis on prevention. Treat employee incidents like you would resident incidents and gather as many facts as possible. Most incidents won’t require them entirely, but you will be happy to have accurate and timely facts for the incidents that do.
Fourth, tell ERNwest. Report all incidents—even if you don’t have all the facts gathered yet—within two days. This allows your claims manager to stay on top of any potential claim that may be filed and averts having to reverse any bad decision made by L&I.
Fifth, analyze the incident. One job of a safety committee is to analyze incidents and come up with suggestions on how to prevent future occurrences. They are looking to prevent a recurrence of both the proximate cause (the thing that caused the incident), and the root causes (the things that created what caused the incident). This is exactly the same as what is done when a resident incident occurs.
If the employee wishes to seek care, they have a right to do so and have that care paid for by workers’ compensation. However, many incidents can be taken care of with first aid or RICE (Rest, Ice, Compression, Elevation) and employees do not have to seek care if they wish to try first aid or other remedies first.
If you’d like to train your management teams on incident reporting, investigation and analysis, please contact your ERNwest team members below or ask your claims manager to put you in touch.
Shamus Harmon, WHCA Loss Control Manager, sharmon@ernwest.com
Jennifer Aldrich, WHCA Performance Specialist, jaldrich@ernwest.com