What you know is not important, it’s what you don’t that is critical for many businesses; it is these areas of non-visibility which can expose Boards to real risk. This is why management and executive teams need access to quick and accurate information around health and safety within their organisations. 

A significant project within one of the major rail organisations demonstrates that it is now time to have the IT team involved in H&S reporting, something which does not happen traditionally. However as the reporting around H&S becomes more sophisticated the IT teams need to consider H&S as another critical element of business intelligence. Project EU, a leading independent consultancy providing specialist business process and finance systems advice, has been working with major organisations, building in H&S reporting far beyond simple RIDDOR statistics. “We have just completed a significant health and safety project for a leading rail organisation,” Donna Butchart, MD of Project EU said. “Companies want to be able to effectively report on the real-time status of their health and safety. Best practice is dictating that teams need to move away from a simple review of numbers, we are now working with clients to calculate specific frequencies which allow the organisation to help monitor and control accidents and injuries to the workforce.”

This means the IT Director is becoming involved in identifying a way of taking disparate recorded data to generate something useful and meaningful. This could include the frequency of weighted injuries, the frequency of fatal accidents and the frequency of lost time based on injuries and accidents. The purpose of the ongoing commitment to H&S is to provide an understanding of how the organisation is performing and seek to improve behaviour and processes. Effective H&S reporting helps to achieve this. “Health & safety is one of the true life-and-death scenarios within an organisation,” Donna Butchart concluded. “By monitoring current performance it is possible to mitigate risks through improved approaches.”