Too many CARs are being issued for minor safety issues such as minor lascerations, minor cuts. I believe a CAR should be written for an incident where the employee is taken to the hospital. Now, if there is a trend of minor safety related incidents within a dept or time frame I would agree that a CAR could also be issued. In a company I am auditing I found this issue. What is you recommendation, how are these type of safety issues handled by other org. Any samples to share?

Too many CARs are being issued for minor safety issues such as minor lascerations, minor cuts. I believe a CAR should be written for an incident where the employee is taken to the hospital. Now, if there is a trend of minor safety related incidents within a dept or time frame I would agree that a CAR could also be issued. In a company I am auditing I found this issue. What is you recommendation, how are these type of safety issues handled by other org. Any samples to share?

What is the total population of employees and the number of CAR's over a period of a month?

3 days and 3 CARs for very minor incidents. The trend is pointing to more CARs to be issued based on their current criteria which they don't have, example: what would be a minor injury, a medium and serious criteria before CAR issuance. Naturally a major incident would be a hospital visit. We are mainly trying to see a safety injury tracking control implemented in order to drive the process more efficiently and not react by issuing a CAR for every minor employee accident issue.

3 days and 3 CARs for very minor incidents. The trend is pointing to more CARs to be issued based on their current criteria which they don't have, example: what would be a minor injury, a medium and serious criteria before CAR issuance. Naturally a major incident would be a hospital visit. We are mainly trying to see a safety injury tracking control implemented in order to drive the process more efficiently and not react by issuing a CAR for every minor employee accident issue.

Hmmm... maybe the CAR needs to be issued BEFORE someone gets to the hospital?

My company uses a custom software package to classify and respond to safety related action requests. The amount of effort spent in investigating the root causes / contributing causes or responding to / addressing the issues is directly related to the severity or potential for an injury. Of course, when the health and safety of people are valued above all else, we tend to try and err on the side of caution and treating all safety related action requests, no matter how minor in appearance, and no matter the size of our company, as if they could have caused an injury.

We use a separate system for quality / audit related corrective or preventive actions.

Groo3, thanks. Can you expand on your reply. It seems you have the right approach to address my request. I do agree with you that it is best to err on the side of caution.
Let's see you have a different program "We use a separate system for quality / audit related corrective or preventive actions" Expand a bit on this please.

What type of software is being used?

Too many CARs are being issued for minor safety issues such as minor lascerations, minor cuts. I believe a CAR should be written for an incident where the employee is taken to the hospital.:mg:

Firstly, why is this being reported under ISO 9001? Occupational health & safety is not part of ISO 9001.

Secondly, for meaningful responses, it would be important to to know what kind of business is this, where "minor lacerations" would be acceptable. Even in developing countries that threshold would be questioned.

Thirdly, to make an analogy to the Quality world, what you are proposing by I believe a CAR should be written for an incident where the employee is taken to the hospital would be analogous to say: Corrective action would only be appropriate when a customer receives a major non-conforming product.

Lacerations and minor cuts are accidents. For every accident, you have a much higher number of incidents. If you mistakenly propose corrective actions only for major accidents, you need to be qualified in modern safety management. You want to PREVENT accidents. For that, you have to take action on INCIDENTS. Analogous to a QMS, you want minor issues being prevented from escalating. For example, OHSAS 18001:2007 requires corrective actions on INCIDENTS.

Sorry but your thinking is not in line with modern safety management. An organization which culturally accepts injuries as a "cost of doing business" does not show it values the workforce.

:mg:

Firstly, why is this being reported under ISO 9001? Occupational health & safety is not part of ISO 9001.

Secondly, for meaningful responses, it would be important to to know what kind of business is this, where "minor lacerations" would be acceptable. Even in developing countries that threshold would be questioned.

Thirdly, to make an analogy to the Quality world, what you are proposing by would be analogous to say: Corrective action would only be appropriate when a customer receives a major non-conforming product.

Lacerations and minor cuts are accidents. For every accident, you have a much higher number of incidents. If you mistakenly propose corrective actions only for major accidents, you need to be qualified in modern safety management. You want to PREVENT accidents. For that, you have to take action on INCIDENTS. Analogous to a QMS, you want minor issues being prevented from escalating. For example, OHSAS 18001:2007 requires corrective actions on INCIDENTS.

Sorry but your thinking is not in line with modern safety management. An organization which culturally accepts injuries as a "cost of doing business" does not show it values the workforce.

My thoughts as well... and how often are your employees sent to the hospital?

Groo3... Can you expand on your reply...
What type of software is being used?

At my company, there is an "Accident / Incident Management" database that was customized by an external Lotus Notes developer long before my business got bought out. Since the parent company was using that, when we were aquired, we adopted their database for all our accident / incident (safety) investigations / corrective actions. Prior to the aquisition, we had our own home-grown database that was not very effective in managing incident investigations. Our site management and business have made it clear to all employees that "The health and safety of people are valued above all else." As you can imagine, with a business statement like that, this database gets lots of attention by site and business management.

I agree with Sidney::yes:
:mg:
Occupational health & safety is not part of ISO 9001.


You probably could use an ISO-9001 compliant corrective / preventive action system for safety corrective actions, but you need to ask the question how effective is it in capturing and addressing the safety issues? From what I have observed in comparing our databases, our Accident / Incident Management database is much more comprehensive and is targeted specifically at the recording, investigation and resolution of safety related near-misses, incidents and accidents.

For internal corrective and preventive actions (the normal, non-safety stuff, including audit corrective and preventive actions), we use a comprehensive Lotus Notes ISO-9001 / ISO-14001 compliance package (we were originally just looking for something that would help us maintain our procedures and forms electronically). This software package includes several databases to help meet the needs of most quality management systems, including a Corrective / Preventive Action database. This database may be used for QMS or EHS corrective / preventive actions. EHS corrective / preventive actions should not be confused with safety near-misses, accidents or incidents. EHS corrective / preventive actions are typically the result of our various internal safety audits.

Believe it or not, we actually use a third system for Responsible Care® corrective actions.:mg:

There was another forum discussion thread for QMS software if I am not mistaken. I don't want to get :topic: here, so let me know if you want a list of the programs we used, I can send you those names off-line.