10+ Free Incident Report Templates

December 2, 2022 4 min read 106

Download these 10+ Free Incident Report Templates in MS Word format to help you prepare your very own Incident Report quickly and easily. You can also download our collection of Free Executive Summary Templates.

Organizations and companies understand how complex and difficult it can get if their employees are working under unsafe environment and something causes an incident or injury to the employees. That’s why organizations always take extra precautions to ensure that employees are working safely and they won’t put themselves or others’ lives at danger anyhow. But this sounds nice in an ideal world only where the company doesn’t need to create an incident report at all. In the actual world, there are many incidents in organizations and companies on regular basis. Some of these incidents are very small and ignorable while some are very important and should be dealt with strict policies so they don’t occur in future. In order to fully understand an incident, get to know its causes and to not let it happen again, an incident report is created.

Guidelines to create an effective Incident Report:

Gather all required facts:

In order to create an effective incident report, you should do necessary preparation first. Being a professional, you shouldn’t just dive into the report but get to know the facts, figures and the actual incident a little better and then create your points to understand every aspect. This way when you create the actual report, you can just follow your points and ensure you don’t forget anything or mess up an important fact. Some of the most important facts to consider include; date and time of the incident, details of the employees involved in the incident, details of the witnesses of the incident, nature of the incident, events that led to the incident, overall situation i.e. weather, temperature, level of noise, injuries caused to the employees, damage caused to the company property and treatment for the injuries.
Understand the sequence:

An effective incident report starts from point A and ends on point Z with including everything in between in a sequence. For instance, you can’t discuss the events that took place after the incident before the events that took place before the incident or the events that led to the incident. This means you need to start with the first thing or event that somehow led to the actual incident. Although it’s not very common but for complicated incidents, incident reports also include diagrams and pictures to provide better explanation of the events according to the timeline.
Analysis of causes:

Then there is the part where you evaluate and analyze each and every cause or event that somehow led to the actual incident. This is different from the above section because here you will take brief look into each event and you will explain what role it played in the incident’s existence. This can be the misunderstanding of the employees to environment problems i.e. wet floor or not enough light etc.
Recommendations:

Again an effective incident report can’t be completed without your recommendations to prevent the same incident from happening again in the future. Although when you discuss each cause and evaluate its role in the incident, there is nothing left to explain but a good incident report must include personal recommendations from the person in charge of writing the report. These recommendations will help the organization or department to keep an eye for the similar events and prevent the same or similar incident from happening twice.
Executive summary:

Depending on the nature of the incident, an incident report can be as short as a statement or as long as dozens of pages. If the report is actually very lengthy and it will be given to an executive i.e. CEO or partners, they won’t have time to go through it. In that case, you also need to include an executive summary at the end of the incident report. This summary should mention all of the required elements but these are not discussed comprehensively. Instead, everything is kept brief and to the point. An executive summary of an incident report should only contain 1-2 paragraphs.

Free Incident Report Templates:

Here are 10 Free Incident Report Templates prepared by our staff using MS Word to assist our website visitors in preparing their own Incident Report quickly.