You and GSS Safety

Did you know that the safety incident management system at GSS starts and ends with you?

At the September General Staff Meeting (GSM),  staff got a ‘behind the scenes’ tour of the workflow and processes in place to manage and benefit from Incident Reports in this agency. The process is designed so your Incident Reports help GSS prepare for, assess, manage, and mitigate incidents to better protect staff and clients.

• The GSM tour showed that reports are not just completed and filed at the program level. The Incident Report journey continues after program managers upload reports to a central database. There, Executive Administrative office staff group the Incident Reports by risk level and prepare a quarterly summary of the higher risk incidents and actions taken or planned to reduce incident recurrence.

• Then leadership staff step in. Every quarter, Leadership and Executive Teams review the summary report to see if further actions, i.e., procedure changes, training, are needed to address or respond to some type of incident or trend. Decisions are recorded and any additional actions to be completed are tracked.

• The final part of the Incident Report journey is communication. The quarterly highlights are shared with the Board and the Occupational Health and Safety Committee. An equally important part is ‘closing the loop’ with staff. That has been happening in different ways, including GSM presentations and staff newsletter stories. At the program level, Incident Report follow ups can happen in different ways like shift change notes or team meeting discussions.

After the tour of the safety incident management system flowchart at the GSM, staff were invited to give feedback about how well that last part of the system, ‘closing the loop’, was working for them. To give all frontline staff a chance to comment, on September 17th a link to a brief online survey was sent to all staff for input. Thanks in advance for your input and for your important contribution to the GSS safety incident management system. Remember--everyone plays a role in safety!