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When an incident occurs in your building are you equipped with the right tools and processes to manage the situation? Surprisingly, many buildings continue to manage their incident tracking system through cumbersome manual systems that are inefficient but, most importantly, increase risk and liability exposure. Below is an example based on real events that reveals the solution.

A Tale of Two Incidents: (dd:hh:mm)

00:00:00 The incident: A woman is helped to the guard desk by two bystanders and tells the guard that she has slipped on chocolate milk and thinks she may have broken her leg.

00:00:10 The guard follows protocol and calls for emergency services who promptly arrive and take the woman to the hospital.

Scenario 1 – the Manual System:

00:00:20 The guard hand writes an incident report and faxes it to the property manager’s office. In the report the guard writes:

 “Yet again, a woman was helped to the guard desk by two other people saying she had fallen down an injured herself. The woman stated that she fell when she stepped in a puddle of chocolate milk that was on the floor. I asked her is she needed an ambulance and she said yes. I called 911 and she was then taken to the hospital.”

00:01:10 The report sits in the property managers fax inbox for about an hour before it is picked up.

00:01:20  The property manager calls his supervisor and leaves a voice mail about the incident and files the fax away .

00:02:20  Receiving the voicemail after returning from an hour long meeting, the supervisor sends an email to the risk management consultant who immediately calls the property manager and tells him to immediately determine where the chocolate milk spill was located, take a picture of the accident site, and get the names of any witnesses.

Scenario 2 – the Technology Driven Solution:

00:00:20 The guard opens Incident Tracking and Notification system. He enters general information using a predefined set of fields, including the location (a retail cafeteria) and the same narrative as in scenario 1, and “submits” the incident report. The system automatically emails the report to the property manager and, because it involves an injury, both the risk management consultant and the regional operations manager located at the headquarters 400 miles away receive emails.

00:00:21  The risk management consultant is on the road but he still gets his email via his wireless device and immediately the calls the property manager and tells him to go to the cafeteria, take a picture of the accident site, and get the names of any witnesses. The risk management consultant also sees that the guard in his narrative said “Yet again” implying that the building was negligent in maintaining the facility. The consultant edits the narrative removing the “Yet again” statement. The risk management consultant then calls the cafeteria’s management to inform them of the incident and explain that situation.

 

00:00:23  The property manager arrives at the cafeteria and locates the spill just as it was to be cleaned up. He takes a picture with his camera and locates three people who saw the woman fall. He collects their contact information, takes a brief statement, and enters the information in the incident report.