Link two inspections / templates (incident report and incident investigation)

Hi @ldutton thanks so much again for reaching out and for sharing some of the details of your incident management process. I’m interested to learn more about the incident reporting you mentioned in your first paragraph...you mentioned you track this “manually externally” is that currently off the Safety Culture platform on paper? 

our first line of defense is to use actions i.e. “please create an action for your manager to investigate this” we then use the SQL downloader into an Access database where we track / match incidents and investigation and any other templates that require a follow up inspection, our concern is if someone report something and assigns the action to the wrong person and it gets missed or nefariously assigns it to them selves or does not read /understand the action and marks it as complete by accident we need the investigation to happen.

We have use cases that could work for this as well. 

• For near misses and accidents, we’ve struggled with how best to report these.
  • Do we use issues for the “at the moment” details of what happened and the eyewitness accounts?  If we do, we can link an inspection later but would have to manually re-enter some of the details captured in the issue.
  • Do we use an inspection template which has more flexibility on the questions?
    • We either have to restrict who can access it due to additional details that are HIPAA protected, but this will make it harder to report if not everyone can do it.
    • Or we have to use two templates, one for the at the moment basic details and one for the administrative investigation which contains HIPAA information.  If we could assign a secondary template, someone with access would need to manually re-enter some of the details captured in the first template.
• For new equipment factory acceptance testing (purchase/build review before shipping to site) and site acceptance testing (functionality and installation on site) - FAT and SAT - we have begun using an inspection template. 
  • We currently combine both into a single template.  In some ways this is nice because it’s like a portfolio binder of everything about that equipment from purchase to installation, and it isn’t complete with both halves until it shows 100% and is closed.  The downside is that there are additional people involved in the SAT portion, so we have to give them report access to all inspection reports (which will be for all sites) or ensure that one of the people that filled out the FAT are on site and able to open/continue the inspection. It also makes it hard to known when the front half of FAT is done because it is never marked as complete.
  • If we separate it into two templates, we can change access controls where they still see these from all sites but only the SAT portion.  However, we would have to manually re-enter some of the details from the FAT inspection into the SAT.  It would allow us to easily see when the FAT and SAT are each complete.
• For nonconforming material/product, we have a site testing using inspections versus purchasing a separate system.  Similar to the above, you have two (maybe three) parts - reporting the defect, completing the disposition work, and correcting the cause.  There are pros and cons to splitting it up.
• Another use case is product qualifications, which has 3 phases.  We have investigated using SafetyCulture for this purpose.  There are pros and cons to splitting it up as well. 

So if you have the need to create an inspection from an inspection, I could see a handful of options that would be beneficial.  Certainly you can do this with the Integration Builder, Zapier, etc.  But a built-in method would be used more widely.

1. Option for no linked inspectinos
2. Option to allow ANY template the user has access to be linked to the inspection
3. Option to allow only a specific template to be linked to the inspection
4. Capability to map specific fields from inspection A to automatically transfer to fields in inspection B and be read-only (or if you change in either, it updates the other) so you don’t have to re-enter details.

Thanks again @Corey and @ldutton for your feedback and suggestions of how we can string together a formidable issues/incident experience.  

The situation and possible solutions as detailed by @ldutton above is exactly what we are looking at for our own situation.

We currently have an Incident report that the worker in the field will fill out and then there are questions at the end that the administration can add when the investigation is being worked on and foillow up actions determined.

Ideally, we would like to have the initial report with just the details of what happened on site and then a link to another template/inspection for the investigation part of the procedure.

Potentially, we could then link to or create another inspection as an NCR if there are follow up procedural changes we needed to follow up.

In each of these extra inspections - ie. investigation and/or NCR - we could perhaps limit access to the relevant personnel in order to keep any more sensitive information from being widely available.

Thanks so much for sharing @Susan Christian. Ideas and use cases like the one you shared sure are getting our minds moving over at SC HQ ! 

I’m also looking at the best way of having a formal “Incident reporting” to link multiple reports or issues and also better manage formal registered and reportable  Incidents.

I looked at doing it in SafetyCulture when “Issues” was introduced back in 2020 but issues did not have the structure to fit into our regulatory reporting requirements and did not provide a way of uploading some existing information. I tried a few other options but ended up back with my legacy database system.

The new Lite licence and the integrated training made me have a good look again if Incident reporting has been better integrated. A 2024 requirement to meet new European Aviation Safety Authority (EASA) regulations to implement a safety management System (SMS) for maintenance organisations seems a good opportunity to check what other people are doing in strictly regulated industries such as Food and Pharma.

For the case of Near Misses/Accidents, I’m really hoping the upcoming Issues features and a few down the road will solve that.  If it has a better flow when creating one, fields can be required, documents can be uploaded to them afterwards, and we can link inspections from a specifically selected associated template with auto-filled fields… We can then have a brief “as reported” side, and the more detailed investigation administrative side.

There are other cases where linking Issues to a specific template with auto-populated questions would be handy, such as Nonconforming material → CAPA.  

And yet in other cases, inspection to inspection is best (equipment FAT → SAT).