Regulatory decisions on incidents

Purpose: in many countries an injury at work must be recorded in a log, and the worst ones reported to an authority within a deadline. Custos works out, for each injured person, whether the case counts, and keeps track of the deadlines, so nothing is missed. Today it knows the US OSHA rules; other countries’ rules (for example the UK’s RIDDOR) can be added without changing anything else.

Who: Safety Managers and Org Admins decide. Everyone else sees the result on the incident.

1. Which sites follow a regulation

A site has a country, and the country chooses the regulatory framework: a US site follows US OSHA; a site in a country Custos has no rules for follows No framework. The Org Admin can set the framework on the site by hand. Incidents at a site with no framework are not assessed, and nothing is escalated. See Managing sites.

2. Each injured person is a case

On an incident’s People and evidence and Overview tabs, Recordability (US OSHA) lists each injured person. A case is assessed as:

Result	Meaning
Recordable	It must go on the log
Needs review	Custos cannot tell: a Safety Manager must decide
Not recordable	It does not go on the log

Under Because of, it names the reason (for example a death, days away from work, restricted work, treatment beyond first aid, being kept in hospital, a broken bone). To look at names what is missing, for example no treatment recorded yet, or whether a contractor’s injury counts (it does only if the company supervises their work day to day).

Cases are assessed once the incident is submitted. Until then the page says “Cases are decided on once the incident is submitted.”

3. Decide a case

A Safety Manager can accept Custos’s assessment or override it:

1. Under the person, select Decide… (or Change the decision…).
2. Choose Recordable or Not recordable.
3. Give the reason and Save decision.

Withdraw the decision returns it to what Custos assessed. Decisions show who made them and when. Cases still needing a decision are left out of the injury rates until decided; the dashboard tile Incidents with a case to decide lists them.

4. Reporting to the authority

Some events must be reported to the authority quickly, for example a death, a stay in hospital, an amputation or the loss of an eye. Under OSHA the deadlines are 8 hours for a death and 24 hours for the others. When one happens the incident shows Report to the authority, with Due by time and, if late, Overdue since time.

A Safety Manager then:

• Record the report…: enter when the authority was told and, optionally, the authority’s reference, then Record report; or
• Dismiss…: with why it need not be reported, then Dismiss.

The dashboard shows Reports to the regulator to make and Overdue reports to the regulator. The incident list can be filtered by Report to the authority: To report, Overdue, Reported, Dismissed.

5. Privacy cases

OSHA lets the log hide a person’s name in certain cases (for example some injuries to private body parts or sexual assault). On the case, Make a privacy case replaces the name on the OSHA 300 log with “Privacy Case”. Remove the privacy case undoes it. See OSHA logs and forms.

6. Good practice

• Record treatment, days away and days restricted on each injured person as soon as they are known; Custos cannot assess a case without them.
• Treat an escalation deadline as urgent: a late report is itself a violation.
• Write a clear reason for every override. It is part of the permanent record.