A safety incident is a chain, not a form: cases, work holds and corrective actions
Most safety processes are good at collecting the first form. The gap appears afterwards: who owns the case, what work is stopped, what corrective action was agreed, who verified it, and what evidence allows the case to close.
The FieldElite demo workspace includes five safety cases across Acme Facilities and Northwind Cold Chain. Two of them show why the chain matters.
Two incidents, one pattern
At Acme, a water leak at Riverside Offices creates a slip hazard. At Northwind, a forklift reverses into a doorway where an engineer is working. One is a hazard, the other is a near miss. Both need a report, an owner, a hold, corrective action and a defensible close.
The details differ. The structure is the same.
The case inbox
Incidents, near misses, hazards and assistance requests arrive in one inbox. Routing rules assign an owner by type and urgency. That means a near miss does not sit in a general mailbox while an incident gets attention.
The case is linked to the job, the site and the people involved. The safety record and the operational record are not two separate stories.
Work holds must be explicit
A work hold is not a status label. It has a scope, release requirements and a reassessment. The important design decision is that closing the case does not quietly release the hold.
In the demo, the water-leak incident creates a hold on the affected work. The hold stays visible until an authorised person releases it. That prevents the most dangerous version of closure: the paperwork is finished, but the hazard is still there.
Corrective actions need an owner and a verification
A corrective action is only useful if someone owns it and someone verifies it. The demo workflow covers both: complete the action, then verify it. The evidence stays with the case.
That is the difference between “we told the contractor to fix it” and “the fix was completed, checked and recorded”.
Near-miss investigation without the blame exercise
The Northwind near miss has a timeline, causes, findings and a restricted witness statement. The structure keeps the investigation factual and makes the sensitive evidence visible only to the right people.
A near miss is a free lesson. The point is to capture it while the detail is fresh, not to reconstruct it after the next incident.
Assistance cases
Not every case is an incident. The demo includes an assistance case where advice is provided and the worker confirms it was received. That matters for lone workers and remote teams: the record shows that support was offered and acknowledged.
Checklist alerts and the report
The safety story does not stop at the case. Lifecycle checklists provide the early warning:
- A failed start-of-visit check blocks work pending review.
- A missing end-of-visit check becomes an owned alert.
- An overdue review appears in the checklist report.
The report shows received, outstanding and not received. That is a more honest view than a completion percentage that hides the missing checks.
What to set up first
- Define the case types you actually use: incident, near miss, hazard, assistance.
- Set routing rules for owner and urgency.
- Agree what a work hold means and who can release it.
- Add one critical start-of-visit and one end-of-visit check.
- Run one case from report to verified corrective action.
Plan fit
Case management, work holds and the workflow engine are part of Professional. Checklists and the mobile app are included from Starter, and forms join on Growth. Enterprise adds broadcasts, voice conferencing, direct conversations, geofence arrival and custom integrations for larger safety-critical operations.
See the plan comparison, or start a 30-day trial and run one case end to end.
The Acme Facilities and Northwind Cold Chain scenarios come from the FieldElite demo workspace and are illustrative, not real customer results.
