Glasgow City Council

When extending the incident reporting functionality of HandS, Graeme wanted to ensure the system remained easy and user friendly for its user community to utilise.

After careful consideration with the Info Exchange team, HandS was enhanced to provide its users with one incident management form and through the use of the software’s conditional and dynamic questioning functionality, the appropriate questions are asked depending on the incident type. Graeme remarks “Behind the scenes our system is quite complex but to the user its intuitive based on the category and sub-category of incident they select from our drop-down menu.”

“To capture as much information as possible but in an efficient way for the end user, we utilise the software’s smart forms, including drop down selections, mandatory fields and as we mentioned the conditional questioning. This not only benefits our users, it helps the council collect our data in a consistent manner.”

When deciding to implement software, Graeme and his team had two key goals they wanted to achieve, being able to identify and respond to a serious incident immediately and collect their incident data in such a way, they could monitor trends and make the appropriate improvements.

With such a large estate and a reliance on staff such as head teachers to report incidents, Graeme wanted to ensure the system was built in such a way, a potential RIDDOR could be identified immediately and his team could respond effectively.  In order to achieve this, calculations were built into the council’s incident form and workflow management was configured to notify the team immediately, giving the Services Health & Safety Teams reassurance they won’t miss any serious events. Graeme comments “We are able to manage what is going on rather than waiting to be told’ which has improved our incident management across all sites”.

When discussing how Info Exchange has helped the council achieve those initial goals, Graeme comments “We now have access to all of our incident data and can easily drill down to establish what incidents are happening regularly and why.

This has allowed us to monitor and review the number of incidents we have across all of our services and the number of claims, bringing both ethical and financial benefits.”
 
With incident management now truly overhauled, we asked Graeme what was next for the council. 

A comprehensive Fire Risk Assessment App has been developed and about to go live Council wide which will allow Services to complete and monitor their Fire Risk Assessments across the full estate, and monitor all actions raised to completion.

Currently in development is an Audit and Inspections module for the council which can assist us to monitor Health & Safety compliance in all areas of the Council as well as carry out specific audits for targeted areas such as asbestos, legionella etc. and Graeme would also like to develop further applications for example Sypol's CMS system for COSHH Management as we expand our Health & Safety Management System across the Council.