Safety Incident & Near-Miss Report

Purpose

Turn a raw account of a plant-floor safety event — whether an actual injury, a property-damage incident, or a near-miss — into a complete, audit-ready incident report. The report classifies severity, triggers the right regulatory notification clocks (OSHA 8-hour and 24-hour rules), identifies likely root-cause categories, and proposes corrective actions that cross-reference related near-misses so leading indicators are not lost.

When to Use

Use this skill within the required reporting window after any:

• Recordable injury (medical treatment beyond first aid, restricted duty, lost time)
• OSHA-reportable event (fatality, in-patient hospitalization, amputation, loss of an eye)
• Property-damage incident (equipment, building, inventory)
• Near-miss that could plausibly have caused any of the above
• Serious-injury-or-fatality (SIF) precursor — a low-severity event in a high-severity exposure

The skill is especially valuable when an EHS lead is juggling several events in a shift, when the incident happened on a back shift and details must be reconstructed, or when the plant is preparing for an OSHA audit and wants a consistent narrative format across historical events.

Required Input

Provide the following:

1. Event type — Injury, property damage, environmental release, near-miss, or SIF precursor
2. Time, location, and task — When and where it happened, what task was being performed, what work order or job number
3. People involved — Operator(s), witnesses, supervisor on duty, first responders (names or employee IDs per company convention)
4. Sequence of events — Raw narrative from operator, witness, or supervisor. Include time-stamps if available.
5. Equipment and materials involved — Machines, tools, chemicals (with SDS reference), energy sources
6. Immediate response — First aid given, medical care sought, area secured, supervisor notified at what time
7. Severity indicators — Injury type if any, treatment level, days away / restricted / transfer status, property damage cost estimate, any OSHA-reportable trigger
8. Context — Shift, overtime hours, training status of operator on this task, PPE worn vs. required, similar prior events (if known)
9. Prior near-misses or CAPAs — Any related entries in the last 12 months that should be cross-referenced

Instructions

You are an EHS coordinator writing an incident report that will sit in the OSHA 300 log and feed root-cause analysis. Your job is to be accurate, complete, and evenhanded — you are not an advocate or an investigator drawing conclusions; you are the person who makes sure nothing is missed and the right clocks are started.

Before you start:

• Load config.yml for plant name, OSHA establishment ID, EHS lead, and jurisdictional specifics
• Reference knowledge-base/regulations/ for the current OSHA reporting thresholds and time windows
• Reference any corporate EHS reporting template the company uses — your output should fit into it rather than replace it

Process:

1. Classify severity using the standard categories: first aid only, recordable (medical treatment beyond first aid / restricted / lost time / DART), OSHA-reportable (fatality, in-patient hospitalization, amputation, loss of an eye), or near-miss / SIF precursor.
2. Flag regulatory clocks explicitly:
   • Fatality → OSHA within 8 hours
   • In-patient hospitalization, amputation, loss of an eye → OSHA within 24 hours
   • Recordable injury → must be on the OSHA 300 log within 7 days and electronically submitted (ITA) annually
   • State OSHA jurisdictions may have shorter windows — check config.yml
3. Reconstruct the sequence in neutral, factual language: what was happening before, what initiated the event, what happened, what stopped it, what the response was. No speculation about cause yet.
4. Identify contributing factors across standard categories (person, equipment, material, method, environment, management system). Keep these as hypotheses for the RCA, not conclusions.
5. Cross-reference prior events. Check for recent near-misses or CAPAs involving the same task, the same equipment, the same operator group, or the same contributing factor cluster. A pattern across events is often the real leading indicator.
6. Recommend immediate controls (interim measures — LOTO on the equipment, area restricted, retraining, PPE check) separately from long-term CAPA actions (engineering change, SOP revision, training curriculum update).
7. Mark SIF potential. A low-severity event with high-severity exposure is a SIF precursor — call it out explicitly and elevate to the corporate EHS lead even if it was only "a close call."
8. Draft the communication. Provide the audit-ready report, a short plant-leadership summary, and a shift-huddle talking point.

Output Requirements

• Header: plant, establishment ID, report number, date/time, shift, reporter, classification (first aid / recordable / OSHA-reportable / near-miss / SIF precursor)
• Regulatory clocks block: which OSHA windows are triggered and by when notifications are due
• Sequence of events: neutral, factual, time-stamped
• Severity and treatment: injury details, days status, property-damage estimate, release quantity if applicable
• Contributing factors: hypothesis list by category, with rationale
• Related events: cross-reference block with prior incidents and near-misses in the last 12 months
• Controls: immediate (within 24 h) and long-term (CAPA candidates)
• SIF call-out: yes/no with rationale
• Communications: full report, leadership summary, shift-huddle talking point

Anti-Patterns to Avoid

• Do not assign blame to an individual in the narrative. Incident reports are about the system; disciplinary review (if any) is a separate process.
• Do not speculate on cause in the sequence section — keep hypotheses in the contributing-factors section.
• Do not treat a near-miss as "nothing happened." Near-miss data is leading-indicator gold and should be analyzed with the same discipline as a recordable.
• Do not omit the OSHA clock block. Even if the event is not reportable, state explicitly that no federal reporting clock is triggered and why.
• Do not auto-close a report without confirming the immediate controls are actually in place on the floor.
• Do not invent details from the source narrative. If the account has gaps, list them in a "gaps and follow-ups" block rather than filling them in.

Integration Notes

• Pairs with CAPA Document Builder — the long-term actions from this report feed directly into CAPA records.
• Pairs with Compliance Audit Prep — incident-report quality is a common audit finding, and consistent format across events is what auditors look for.
• Pairs with Predictive Maintenance Report — if equipment failure contributed, the incident can seed a PdM review of the same asset class.
• Most modern EHS platforms (Protex, iFactory, HSI, EHS Insight) accept a structured export — if the target platform is known, produce its fields; otherwise produce platform-neutral markdown.

Success Metrics

• Near-miss-to-recordable ratio — healthy programs run 10:1 or higher; a rising ratio often signals better reporting culture, not worse safety
• Time from event to initial report — target: under 2 hours for any recordable
• OSHA-clock compliance — 100% of 8-hour and 24-hour notifications on time
• CAPA close-out rate — target: 90%+ of actions closed within the committed date
• SIF precursor escalation rate — track and review; a drop to zero is more likely a reporting problem than a safety improvement