Accidents Vs Incidents – What Are the Main Differences?

With so much of our lives spent in our work environment, from the office to construction sites, it is critical that we understand the importance of health and safety in the workplace. Safety is a major factor for all businesses, with a joint effort between employers, employees and contractors to ensure everyone’s well-being.

In this blog, we’ll look at the differences between accidents and incidents in a workplace and what we can do to minimize them.

What is an Accident?

An accident is an unintended event that happens suddenly and leads to injury without one’s foresight or expectation. It often causes damage to property or injury to people, but it doesn’t have to be serious to be considered an accident. Accidents can be as small as a bump in the head due to tripping or as huge as a major chemical burn.

Accidents in the workplace can happen for several reasons:

• The failure of a piece of machinery or equipment
• A lack of training on how to use machinery/equipment correctly
• Inadequate supervision
• Poor workplace conditions
• Failing to follow safety guidelines

Related: Download our free accident report template.

What is an Incident?

An incident is any unplanned event, from a near-miss to a major health and safety breach, that causes property damage — but doesn’t harm any person.

An incident is an event that could have resulted in an accident but didn’t. A good example of an incident is a near-miss report of a person avoiding being struck by a forklift. The driver backed up, turned around and didn’t see the worker walking behind him. The worker stepped out of the way at the last second to avoid being hit by the forklift.

Such incidents can often be minor and cause no harm, but they can also lead to more severe consequences if not addressed.

See how Safetymint can help in managing incidents

Difference between Accidents and Incidents

There’s a distinction between an accident and an incident. An accident is unexpected, unanticipated and usually results in physical injuries and, sometimes, property damage too. An incident is similar to an accident, but no injuries or individual damage are involved.

Both accidents and incidents happen, but often most are preventable. The difference between the two is crucial because it helps us see the difference and understand both vulnerabilities.

A workplace accident can be anything from a small cut or bruise to a major injury, like a burn, fracture or laceration. But an incident is any event that has caused damage to property or the environment.

Incidents are most often reported to show trends in the workplace and for learning purposes. They can be used to analyze and identify hazards in the workplace so that appropriate control measures can be put into place.

Why should you record & analyze Incidents and Accidents?

How do you know what went wrong, how to prevent it in the future and how to prevent another incident from happening again? It’s a question that’s been asked a lot, but the answer is simple — you have to have proper records of your incidents and accidents.

Minimize Damage

When it comes to safety in the workplace, human error will always play a role. You can’t prevent every accident. But you can minimize damage.

When you have a system to make record-keeping easy and accessible, you can analyze incidents, near-misses and accidents to find loopholes to increase safety standards.

So when someone is injured on the job or suffers an accident at work, there are two things you need to do: keep reliable records of what happened and a detailed explanation of how the accident occurred.

Prevent Incidents from Becoming Accidents

It’s always better to prevent an accident than to treat an injury after it occurs. So it’s vital to pay more attention to the incidents to prevent them from becoming future accidents and this is where documenting and analyzing the incidents play a major role.

If it’s something you can learn from, such as a manufacturing problem that you didn’t immediately identify through your regular quality control procedures, then it’s worth taking the time to track down the source before it causes another problem.

Identify Common Trouble Spots

You can use the accident and incident reports to learn about patterns in workplace hazards you might not have been aware of before.

For example, if there are a lot of incidents in a plant near a piece of specific operational equipment or an area, it’s better to analyze the location to find the root cause — and prevent such incidents in the future.

This information can also be extremely useful when filing workers’ compensation claims and switching insurance carriers with less downtime for your business.

You can use a cloud-based incident management software like Safetymint to easily record your incidents quickly and conduct root cause analysis to reduce the frequency of the incidents in the future.