APPLYING QUALITY STANDARD - RECORDING and REPORTING PROCEDURES
How common are accidents and ill health at work?
Health and Safety Executive Statistics in 2013:
 1.1 million people who worked during the last year were
suffering from an illness (long-standing as well as new
cases) they believed was caused or made worse by their
current or past work. 0.5 million of these were new
conditions which started during the year. (This data
refers to 2011/12)
 148 workers were killed at work, a rate of 0.5 fatalities
per 100000 workers.
 782222 other injuries to employees were reported under
RIDDOR, a rate of 311.6 per 100000 employees.
 27 million days were lost overall in 2011/12 due to work-
related ill health or injury (17 days per case) 22.7 million
due to work-related ill health and 4.3 million due to
workplace injury.
Why record and report?
Recording and reporting accidents and ill health at work is
a legal requirement under The Reporting of Injuries,
Diseases and Dangerous Occurrences Regulations 2013
(RIDDOR).
RIDDOR places a legal duty on:
 employers
 self-employed people
 people in control of premises.
These 'responsible persons' must record and report certain
incidents, injuries, diseases and dangerous occurrences
involving employees, self-employed workers and members
of the public.
The information provided through recording and reporting
enables the enforcing authorities (either Health and Safety
Executive (HSE) or local authority Environmental Health),
to identify where and how risks arise, and to investigate
serious accidents.
With this information, the enforcing authorities are able to
help and provide advice on how to reduce injury, and ill
health in the workplace. Such surveillance data can also be
used to put forward an evidence-based rationale for the
introduction of new legislation and/or guidance.
What do responsible persons have to do?
Details of all reportable incidents, injuries, diseases and
dangerous occurrences must be recorded, including:
 the date when the report is made
 the method of reporting
 the date, time and place of the event
 personal details of those involved
 a brief description of the nature of the event or disease.
Records can be kept in any form but must conform to
data protection requirements.
What are they?
Inspections are a way of systematically checking that your
working environment and procedures are meeting the
required standards. An inspection should identify hazards
and be your first step in introducing measures to improve
conditions. They can be formal, informal, recorded or
unrecorded, but what is important is that they are carried
out to a set standard at an appropriate frequency.
Why are they important?
Inspections are a vital element of any safety management
system. They should be used to determine whether you are
meeting the standards you have set for your workplace and
work activities. They are important because if they are
carried out effectively, they allow you to identify and
remedy problems before they become more serious or
result in an incident or accident.
Some inspections are required by law – most people will be
familiar with the need for an annual inspection and safety
check on gas boilers. Examples of other statutory
inspections that should be carried out by a competent
person include equipment such as lifting equipment, local
exhaust ventilation and pressure vessels.
Who is affected/most at risk?
Everyone who visits your workplace or is affected by your
work activities could be at risk if you fail to identify an issue
that could cause harm or damage.
What does the law say?
General Health and Safety Legislation requires employers
to provide a safe place of work, safe access and egress and
safe plant, equipment and systems of work. You need to
carry out inspections in order to see whether you are
providing and maintaining a safe workplace and working
arrangements.
What can be done?
Inspections can be carried out for a number of reasons.
They can be used to:
 check safe conditions
 identify hazardous conditions and
 allow you to put in place remedial measures to improve
matters
There are many ways to carry out inspections from a
simple walk through your premises and putting things right
there and then, to recording your observations in a
notebook. You might use a checklist as a reminder of what
you’re looking for. Whatever method you choose, you
should always be aware of why you’re carrying out the
inspection and, if necessary, make sure you have gathered
enough information to produce a report on your findings.
Who should carry out an inspection?
Many people can carry out inspections for any number of
reasons. External inspections could be carried out by
enforcement officers, insurers, consultants or by a
specialist inspector or engineer, but you should not simply
rely on these external inspections to ensure your workplace
is safe. Employers, supervisors and employees, including
trade union safety representatives, might carry out internal
inspections for their area or department.
Different levels of management might look for different
things during the inspection. Make sure you include the
right people to ensure that appropriate expertise is
available to offer advice and information on any issues that
arise during the inspection. External inspections could be
carried out by enforcement officers, insurers, consultants or
by a specialist inspector or engineer.
Inspections can be planned or carried out without warning
to determine whether adequate standards are being
maintained. 
Good Practice
Before carrying out an inspection you need to decide what
your aims are. The inspection must have a purpose. Decide
what needs to be inspected, how often it needs to be
inspected, who should carry out the inspection, what
specific items or areas need inspecting and what standard
you are looking for. Your standard may be determined by
anything from a legal requirement or local needs.
Your inspection might include looking for unsafe conditions
and unsafe acts. Unsafe conditions might include damage
to floors and faulty or broken equipment. Unsafe acts could
include failure to wear PPE or failure to work in accordance
with safe procedures.
Checklists can be a useful reminder for people carrying out
inspections of what needs to be checked. They can also act
as a record that adequate standards are in place. They may
also need to be specific in stating what safe condition is
expected.
A checklist might include subjective words such as ‘suitable’
and ‘adequate’ but you might be able to use specific terms
such as ‘damaged’, ‘broken’ or ‘missing’. How often you
carry out inspections will depend on the level of risk a
failure might pose.
APPLYING QUALITY STANDARD - RECORDING and REPORTING PROCEDURES
If you carry out monthly inspections and never encounter a
problem you might then be able to change this and carry
out the inspection on a two- or three-monthly cycle. If
every inspection indicates a problem you might need to
carry out inspections more frequently.
It is useful to read through previous inspection reports to
see whether any issues have been identified in the past and
check whether these have been fixed. Those carrying out
the inspection need to have the knowledge and experience
to see whether standards are being met. In some cases this
might include a detailed knowledge of statutory
requirements. For example, someone inspecting lifting
equipment will need detailed knowledge of the legal
requirements for a crane or a forklift truck. You could
allocate responsibility for all workers to inspect the
housekeeping standards for their immediate area and
report any concerns.
Once these things have been agreed, you should decide on
the system you will use to make sure all issues are being
considered. Just as important is how the reporting system
will link in to the process of taking remedial action. Your
procedure must ensure that someone has responsibility for
remedial action by a certain date. Someone should have
responsibility to check that action has been taken in the
agreed time. In addition, you may also need to link with
any relevant risk assessments, if the issues found at the
inspection suggest work procedures, etc. need to be
changed.
Small businesses often ask about the legal documentation
required in relation to health and safety.
Health and Safety Policy
If you employ five or more people you must have a written
health and safety policy. This contains your statement of
general policy on health and safety at work and the
organization and arrangements for putting this into
practice.
Although not legally required to do so, businesses with less
than five employees should also consider having such a
policy as good practice.
A written policy could prove useful if visited by an enforcing
officer.
Manufacturing Quality
Definition
At its most basic level, manufacturing quality is
conformance to specifications. Quality of design and
conformance to specifications provide the fundamental
basis for managing operations to produce quality products.
As customer expectations have risen over time,
manufacturing quality has come to be an absolute
requirement, regardless of where products are
manufactured, distributed, and sold.
Article
Assuring manufacturing quality entails three principal
functions: quality design and engineering, quality control,
and quality management.  The goal of quality engineering is
to incorporate quality into the design of products and
processes, as well as to predict potential quality problems
prior to manufacture and delivery of the product. The
principal task of quality control involves enforcing the use
of specified processes and materials, ensuring qualification
of operators and equipment, and making a series of
planned measurements to determine if quality standards
are being met. If any of these are not achieved, then
corrective action and future preventive action must be
taken to achieve and maintain conformance. Quality
management involves the planning, organization, direction,
and control of all quality assurance activities. While quality
control departments have historically provided technical
support for manufacturing quality, manufacturers have
come to understand that quality must be integrated
throughout the enterprise.
The cost of poor manufacturing quality is high. Rework,
scrap, product failures and recalls can severely damage a
manufacturer through inefficiencies, delays, direct costs,
customer dissatisfaction and low shareholder confidence.
Today manufacturers must build products on time, first
time and every time to achieve and maintain competitive
standing in global markets.
Integrating Manufacturing Quality
Workflows and business processes built on industry best
practices should provide the basis for manufacturing quality
at every step of the manufacturing process. These best
practices error-proof manufacturing processes to ensure
that each step is executed correctly, with complete, fully
traceable data.
Assuring Conformance
The best path to quality is to prevent issues and mistakes
from happening.  To meet conformance requirements,
manufacturing quality systems should automatically
enforce the use of only approved processes, materials,
equipment, tools and operators – before any step can be
performed.  These systems also ensure that all process and
product tests are executed and that the results meet
specifications.  Manufacturing quality systems automatically
create the as-manufactured records that detail the
processes, material, equipment, tools, operators and test
results with time stamps and electronic signatures.
In case any of a deviation in the results, the manufacturing
quality system should react to quality events Further, these
systems should enforce structured failure analysis, root
cause identification, quarantine, and final disposition
(release, rework, scrap, etc.) to ensure manufacturing
quality across the enterprise. From the time a deviation
occurs until disposition, manufacturing non-conformance
reports should be generated to provide complete electronic
traceability and links to the root causes of manufacturing
quality issues. These reports should be created
immediately, when information about product quality is
most readily available, providing visibility and control of the
affected material and preventing products with open issues
from being processed beyond a designated step, issued to
or combined with other products, or shipped to finished
stock or the customer.
Corrective Action/Preventative Action (CAPA)
Management of CAPA is critical to manufacturing quality.
Accordingly, manufacturers are moving to incorporate
closed-loop corrective and preventive action tracking
systems that enable the identification, addressing, and
quick resolution of manufacturing quality issues through
integration with the invaluable data in manufacturing
quality systems.  systems together facilitate the
investigation of manufacturing quality issues such as
nonconformance, customer complaints, incidents, or
discrepancies. Real-time notification and preventive and
corrective action workflows enable manufacturers to
efficiently communicate with all affected parties to
streamline collaborative activities and resolve issues quickly
and effectively. Reporting capabilities provide real-time
visibility into manufacturing trends and quality
management issues, enabling manufacturers to take fast
action to resolve problems and ensure total quality control
over all manufacturing processes.
Increasingly, manufacturing quality is seen as a strategic
imperative for the manufacturing enterprise. The customer,
whose expectations of quality have reached unprecedented
levels, is the ultimate arbiter of quality. Value, satisfaction,
and preference are influenced by many factors throughout
a customer’s purchase, ownership, and service experiences
with a product. As such, manufacturing quality must be
sensitive to existing and evolving customer and market
requirements, and must account for the factors that drive
customer satisfaction. It also must account for
technological development and how it can both impact and
serve the end users of manufactured products, as well as
the manufacturer itself.