Chapter 7
Data Gathering best practice
If the health and safety indicators reported to senior leaders should be succinct and selected, the reverse is true for the safety professionals who prepare those reports. Practitioners should be able to draw on a wealth of information, delving into trends to discover causes for changes in performance, cutting and recutting the data, producing graphs and running reports, either to pass on to others or to aid their own analysis.
This demands a sophisticated system for data gathering, storage and analysis; the time when health and safety metrics could be collated on a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet has passed.
All staff responsible for data gathering must be trained to complete forms fully and accurately as the accuracy of any statistical analysis and the ability to drill down into the data will depend on the quality of their inputs. It will be too late to re-engineer incident records wholesale when they are found to be lacking. Reporting forms should contain as many questions as necessary to give a detailed picture of the circumstances of any incident or ill health case to help get to the underlying causes. Questions that require yes/no responses and minimize the need for free text are ideal, as they ease the time burden of reporting, reduce the scope for ambiguity and make for cleaner, more consistent data.
