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Environmental & Risk Management / Environmental Health & Safety/ Concepts

Establishing Notification for Safety Officers

Safety officers need to know when workplace mishaps occur in the buildings and sites for which they are responsible. When incidents are reported, either by occasional users using the Report Incident task or by users with access to the full system, the safety officer needs to be alerted to a potentially serious situation.

For example, a safety officer needs to:

• review reported incidents so that they are aware of all issues occurring on the site. This enables the safety officer to personally respond to the incident by traveling to the site of the accident where they can oversee that the situation is correctly handled and that the employee receives the required medical treatment.
• supplement the basic incident information reported by the occasional user with further details. For example, they may want to enter additional information about the incident itself, such as the root cause, a detailed description of the incident, the responsible manager, or the employee's activity immediately before the incident occurred. Often the occasional user does not have access to these details; accordingly, the form for the occasional user does not include these additional fields.
• review updates to an entered incident. As the incident is investigated and the root cause is determined, the safety manager may want to be alerted to progress on this item. Each time the incident is updated, the safety officer can be notified.

You can set up a notification system so that safety officers receive an email message when incidents are:

• entered into the system
• updated by other users
• deleted

The notification system can be established to generate an email message for every workplace incident, or only those of certain types-- for example, only incidents that have potentially serious health and safety consequences.

To implement the notification system, follow these steps:

1. For each incident type (as documented in the Incident Types table), set the Notify? field to Yes if you want the system to automatically send an email to the Safety Officer when incidents of this type are entered into the system . Your site may have guidelines as to the severity of the incident type and whether or not it requires the safety officer's involvement.
2. Define the safety officers for buildings, sites, and properties by working the Safety Officer work role.
3. For the employees defined as safety officers, be sure that their email addresses are entered in the Employees table.

Example

Suppose that you have developed the following information:

• Amy Smith and Fran Cummings, along with their email addresses, are listed in the Employees table.
• You have set Amy Smith and Fran Cummings as safety officers for the HQ building.
• The "Spill" incident type's Notify? field is set to Yes.

If an occasional user now reports that a spill has occurred on the 4th floor of the HQ building, the system will automatically send email notifications to the safety officers for building HQ, Amy Smith and Fran Cummings. The system will look up their email addresses in the Employees table.

If users later update this incident to record the resolution, required medical treatment, or other information, the system will generate email notifications to Amy Smith and Fran Cummings so that they are apprised of the incident as it progresses.