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Incidents Overview
In order for work activities to be conducted safely and with minimum impact on the environment, all operations at the University should be planned and the hazards associated with each operation identified and assigned effective controls and barriers. An important aspect of feedback and improving operations is the analysis of any undesired outcome or incident that may occur. In safety the term accident is considered to be a misnomer and is not used to describe unwanted occurrences such as injuries, chemical releases, fires and vehicle collisions. Accident is defined as an event that can not be prevented or occurs by chance. Undesired outcomes almost always have a cause that is preventable with proper planning. Consequently accident is not used in defining these undesired safety outcomes.
An "incident" is a sequence of events or conditions that could result in an injury, illness, uncontrolled chemical release to the environment, unplanned fire, or similar undesirable outcome that deleteriously affects personal safety or the environment. The term "incident" is used to broadly encompass many types of events, because numerous EH&S requirements for incident notification, analysis, and reporting do not allow for simple categorization or development of procedures for each type of incident.
Reporting of Incidents is an expectation of employment at the University. A list of events that are considered reportable incidents can be found at Incidents Listing. Reporting of injures regardless of the degree of injury is strongly recommended as the employee’s ability to obtain remedy through the workers compensation program may be affected if an injury is not reported in a timely manner. All Rensselaer employees, researchers and students are encouraged to report near misses as the compilation of this data enables the University to improve training and re-engineer processes to prevent similar occurrences.
Once an incident has been reported a root cause analysis should be performed to identify measures that will prevent reoccurrence. For incidents with severe outcomes or near miss events that also would have lead to severe outcomes, an immediate assessment of the incident and a root cause analysis performed. The following are considered Type A incidents that require immediate evaluation and root cause analysis.
- Fatality or Hospitalization that is work related
- Uncontrolled release of chemicals to the sanitary or storm drain systems
- Unplanned fire that results in building evacuation (this does not include alarms related to cooking smoke although a cooking fire that does substantial room damage would be a Type A incident).
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