This year has seen the most significant changes to the Civil Justice System for England and Wales since 1999. The need for organisations to have robust online systems for accident investigation and contemporaneous evidence capture is now greater than ever as Paul Tacey explains.
The Lord Justice Jackson Reforms of civil litigation costs and the extension of the Ministry of Justice (MOJ) claims portal were implemented on 1 April 2013 and 31 July 2013 respectively, and will result in very significant changes to the way Employers’ Liability (EL) and Public Liability (PL) claims in England and Wales are handled.
For claims that sit inside of the new portal, with damages valued between £1,000 to £25,000, the time which insurers have to investigate claims and form an opinion on liability has been reduced from 90 working days to 30 working days for EL cases and 40 working days for PL cases. The clock starts ticking the first business day after the claim information is sent to the insurer or defendant.
The prompt reporting of accidents, likely to give rise to a claim and the early supply of all relevant accident documentation, is essential to enable timely liability decisions to be made which can both benefit the injured party and allow for significant costs savings for the defendant. If the portal timescales are not complied with, then claims will not be kept within the portal and the opportunity for significant costs savings will be lost.
While the last decade has seen a shift towards the use of online safety management systems (SMS), it is the Civil Justice System reforms that have abruptly brought the benefits of this technology to the fore. It is important therefore to examine the benefits of online SMS in terms of both incident prevention and claims defensibility, consider why online SMS beats the traditional methods and suggest a blue print of a best practice system.
New approach
Online SMS can help organisations break free from the restrictions of traditional paper and network-based management systems. Created internally, such systems can suffer from data integrity issues, problems with version control, limited functionality and visibility, as well as never being quite complete in build or refinement — all of which can result in a lack of business confidence in the data. Monitoring performance is easier when data can be gathered from multiple sites, divisions and operations and analysed at the click of a button. This is a real and significant advantage over a paper-based system, which can be laborious and prone to inaccuracies.
Offline SMS usually incorporate word and excel files stored locally or even using hard copies of printed documents within filing cabinets. Both rely on extensive manual interaction with information not always readily available and difficult to share with other business locations, as well as it being time-consuming to analyse.
The shift away from resource hungry databases reflects the desire of companies to work smarter and have instant access to key health and safety information at the press of a button. The rapid technological advances in SMS mean there are now intuitive products on the market that can help organisations to work smarter and allow for the immediate recall of vital information.
Management benefits
Online SMS ensure that critical information is captured in one central place and is easily retrievable. This can be extremely valuable to an organisation in the event of a civil claim or an investigation by the enforcing authorities.
Clearly, improving claims defensibility is an obvious advantage of online SMS but there are also considerable benefits for organisations that implement such systems in terms of incident prevention and as far reaching as changing safety culture.
HSG65, the HSE’s guide to successful health and safety management, encourages organisations to integrate an SMS that helps a business manage, monitor and comply with legal obligations.
A professional online SMS that grows with an organisation and is kept up-to-date with changes in legislation and in the workplace makes sharing best practice easy and effective.
For organisations struggling to move away from a culture where safety is still seen as ‘the job of the health and safety manager’ online SMS can support positive change by delegating ownership of key health and safety tasks to operational managers and line supervisors.
Process benefits
Having an online SMS saves time, money and effort for a number of important reasons, including:
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centralises information, reducing duplication;
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creates easy to find materials, records and data;
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improves legibility and accessibility;
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complies with the Data Protection Act;
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manages confidentiality and gives access control;
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facilitates easy reporting;
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makes health and safety professionals more risk focussed;
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demonstrates greater control which provides comfort to insurers;
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reduces business risk; and
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improves claims defensibility by showing a clear audit trail.
For an organisation to continuously improve its health and safety standards, it needs to be able to create and track corrective actions. Effective task management tools can assist here, especially if they include the ability to upload supporting documentation, such as risk assessments, training records and photographs.
It is often beneficial to be able to track and trace activities that are safety related, particularly if there is an incident, which could result in a civil claim and/or criminal action.
With paper-based systems, documentation can go missing or information may not be recorded at the time, both of which may hinder the investigation and resulting corrective actions. With online SMS, which capture and prompt for information, the chances of this happening are greatly reduced.
Wider business benefits
There are a number of wider benefits for the business, which include supporting external certification. It is no coincidence that the emergence of online SMS has come at a time when organisations are increasingly looking to secure external accreditation to best practice standards for health, safety, environment and quality, such as OHSAS 18001, ISO 9001 and ISO 14001. For organisations striving for a fully integrated management system, which incorporates each of these disciplines, online SMS can provide the underpinning framework.
Another wider benefit is business risk registers. An online SMS captures essential information that is relevant to a company’s liability risk profile, from audits to accidents, claims to competence and training records. The system can equally capture other key business risks or feed into a higher-level business risk register, ensuring that health, safety, liability and insurance risks are given the same consideration as other business risks.
A best practice system
A well-conceived and implemented online SMS should include a number of functions:
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Alerts — important events and tasks should be sent to key stakeholders. For example, senior management should know when serious incidents occur, wherever their location. Online systems can ensure important information is communicated to the appropriate people in a timely manner.
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Task management — health and safety management is not just about identifying risks; it is also about ensuring corrective actions are put in place and followed through. This is where task management features come into their own. Assigned tasks not only ensure important dates are not missed, but also enables the progress of any actions, from initiation through to completion, to be traced.
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User levels and permissions — different user access levels allow permissions to be controlled and enable certain roles and responsibilities to be delegated to managers where required.
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Archiving — having an audit trail and archived copies of historic assessments is a vital element of an online SMS. The ability to retrieve archived documents quickly can save vital time and resources during stressful periods such as in the event of a civil claim or criminal action or auditing of an organisation.
Conclusion
Online SMS provide intuitive tools that enhance the management of health and safety. They improve an organisation’s ability to apply lessons learned which can be fed back into the business to prevent incidents and improve claims defensibility.
By storing all accident documentation in one place, organisations should be well placed to support their insurance partners in the event of a civil claim. With a complete set of documents readily available, insurers will be in a stronger position in which to complete a timely investigation on liability within the time allowed by the new protocol.
Quality online SMS also provide insurers with the assurance that their policyholders have robust health and safety processes in place, that corrective actions are closed out and that suitable protocols are in place to check the quality and content of accident investigation reports before they are signed-off.
Housing all safety and liability information in one central system allows risks to be prioritised and ranked, actions to be tracked and progress monitored against a range of activities and projects across single or multiple locations.
The management information that the system captures and the reports it produces provide the business case for change, support the analysis of health and safety performance against corporate objectives, and provide tangible evidence that obligations under health and safety legislation have been discharged.
For businesses that favour an enterprise risk management approach, online SMS provide a tool to improve the business risk profile, with the functionality to integrate other disciplines such as environmental and quality systems, business continuity management, asset management and fire loss prevention.
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An insurer’s view |
Mounting a successful defence to liability claims requires the capture of quality evidence and having the right documentation is absolutely crucial.
With the 2013 Ministry of Justice Reforms in England and Wales, insurers and their clients must work to tight time-scales in which to investigate a claim and put forward a decision on liability. Both clients and insurers require the ability to instantly retrieve a complete set of documentation in the event of a civil claim.
An insufficient investigation often means that it is difficult to challenge the version of events presented by the claimant, for example if there are suspicions that an injury or condition may not be work related.
Missing pieces of documentation can be costly and in some instances may make the difference in relation to a favourable outcome for defendants. |
Paul Tacey is a senior risk manager at QBE European Operations
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This year has seen the most significant changes to the Civil Justice System for England and Wales since 1999. The need for organisations to have robust online systems for accident investigation and contemporaneous evidence capture is now greater than ever as Paul Tacey explains.
