Reporting an incident

This page is for support workers. It covers reporting an incident from the visit you are on, what each field means, and who is told.

Anyone who works with clients can report an incident, support workers and coordinators alike. There is no permission to ask for first.

Reporting from a visit

1. Open the visit.
2. Tap “Report incident” at the top of the visit sheet. On a phone it is the siren button.
3. The form replaces the visit for a moment. The “Back” button returns you to it.
4. Fill in the form and tap “Report incident”.
5. You come back to the visit and it says “Incident logged.”

Reporting from the visit means the report keeps the visit and the client with it, so the office does not have to work out which call it happened on.

The fields

Field	What to put in it
“Client”	Already filled in with the client whose visit you are on. Change it only if the incident was about someone else.
“Date”	Already filled in with the visit’s date.
“Time (optional)”	Already filled in with the time now. Change it if the incident happened earlier.
“What kind of incident”	The closest category. See the list below.
“Severity”	“Low”, “Medium” or “High”.
“What happened”	Required. Write what you saw, in plain words.

You cannot send the form without a date and a description.

The categories

“Fall”, “Medication error”, “Safeguarding concern”, “Serious injury”, “Death”, “Missing person”, “Police involved”, “Complaint”, “Near miss”, “Other”.

Pick the category that fits. Severity guides who looks first, but everything lands in the log either way, so never downgrade something to keep it quiet.

The CQC prompt

Choosing “Safeguarding concern”, “Serious injury”, “Death”, “Missing person” or “Police involved” shows a red line:

“This kind of incident normally needs a statutory notification to CQC. The registered manager must send it. This record keeps that you were told.”

You do not send the notification. Your job is to report it accurately and quickly. The registered manager sends the notification to CQC, and the record keeps that the prompt was shown.

What happens next

• The incident appears in the log the moment you send it, newest first.
• Every incident also goes on the coordinators’ alerts shelf, so it is chased until somebody has seen it.
• Anything that is not “Low”, and anything in one of the five categories above, emails the organisation’s coordinators with your name and the date. The five categories email the owner and the registered manager too. The email carries no client name and no details.
• The incident appears on the client’s record, on their “Incidents” tab, for coordinators.
• A coordinator can close it with what was done about it, and reopen it later with a reason. Both are recorded.

Seeing what you reported

Open “Incidents” from “Menu”. As a support worker you see the incidents you reported yourself. Reporting into a void hides mistakes, so your own reports always stay visible to you.

You can also report an incident away from a visit, from the “Report incident” button on the “Incidents” page and on “My week”. Then pick the client yourself, or leave it as “Not about a client”.