Setting Up User Defined Incident Data (Release 9.2 Update)
Tracking information for health and safety incidents can be complicated. Each incident requires you to enter the right information to comply with regulations, and to ensure that you have a complete and accurate record of the incident. The information that is required for each incident can vary widely between organizations, and also between different incident types within an organization.
To enable you to track the information you need, you can use User Defined Data to define the fields you need to record for each incident type your organization uses.
To begin, you must set up user defined data, which includes:
Setting up data groups.
Setting up UDC values for fields you will access in user defined data.
Creating user defined data templates.
Once user defined incident data is set up, users can select an existing incident record and add user defined data that is specific to the incident record type.
To set up user defined incident data, you should first define a plan for the data you will need. You should identify the data groups that you want to use for each incident record type, and the fields that you want to associate with each of those data groups. A data group is a collection of user defined data fields that are related to each other for a common purpose. Incident record type is a field available to use to classify or organize incident records into high level types. Different record types might have different user defined incident data needs. For example, you might create a data group to store information about risk assessments, safety inspections, or safety audits.
When defining your user defined data plan, use these guidelines:
Each data group can contain up to 25 fields.
If you need more than 25 fields for a single topic, consider creating 2 data groups for the topic. For example, if you need to create 40 user defined fields for a safety audit, you might create data groups AUDIT_PG1 and AUDIT_PG2.
Fields 01 through 20 on each data group have a maximum character length (data size) of 50, depending on the data type used to define the field. Fields 21 through 25 have a fixed length of 200, and these 5 fields must be alphanumeric.
Fields 01 through 10 are displayed in the first group box on the Incident User Defined Data Revisions form, fields 11 through 20 in a second group box, and fields 21 through 25 in a third group box. Consider using these groupings when determining the field number for similar or related fields.
Fields do not need to be added sequentially. For example, you might set up fields 01, 02, 05, and 21 for a data group.
Be aware that if you skip field numbers, by default the Incident User Defined Data Revisions form will display blank spaces where the “skipped" numbers would be. For example, if you create a data group template using field numbers 01, 02, and 05, there will be two lines of blank space between field 02 and 05. You can use form personalization to update the appearance of the form.
You can associate multiple data groups with a single incident record type.
Twenty UDC tables have been created for use with user defined incident data. Those UDC tables are 54HS/U0 through 54HS/U9 and 54HS/D1 through 54HS/D9.
You can customize these UDC tables to meet your needs. Additionally, you can use any existing UDC table when setting up user defined incident data.
This table illustrates an example of a user defined data plan for a safety observation that uses 5 fields:
Incident Record Type |
Data Group |
Field Number |
Field Name |
Field Type |
Field Length |
Required? |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Recordable Incident |
SAFETY |
1 |
Observation Date |
Date |
6 |
Y |
Recordable Incident |
SAFETY |
2 |
Observer |
Numeric - validate against Address Book |
8 |
Y |
Recordable Incident |
SAFETY |
3 |
Shift |
Alphanumeric - validate against Shift UDC (00/SH) |
1 |
|
Recordable Incident |
SAFETY |
4 |
Time of Observation |
Time |
8 |
|
Recordable Incident |
SAFETY |
21 |
Observation Findings |
Alphanumeric |
200 |
Once you understand your data needs, you then add all of your data groups in UDC table 54HS/DG, and add any necessary values to other UDC tables you will use.
Once your UDC tables are complete, you use the Incident User Defined Data Templates program (P54HS115) to build your templates.