Understanding BC WCB Reporting Based Upon Incident Outcomes

The BC WCB recognizes five types of incident outcomes for health and safety incidents. The following table lists these outcomes in increasing order of severity.

Incident Outcome	Definition
Dangerous Occurrence	The least severe outcome. An event is a dangerous occurrence when no workers are injured but there is a potential for serious injuries. You complete the pages in the report about incident-related information rather than injury-related information.
Reported Only	An event in which one or more workers are injured, but the workers do not require health care treatment or lose time away from work. The workers may or may not receive first aid treatment. You report this type of event at the discretion of the employer or at the worker's request.
Health Care Only	An event in which one or more workers are injured and a health care practitioner renders care for at least one worker, but the injuries do not result in any time away from work. The workers may or may not receive first aid treatment.
Short Term Disability	An event in which one or more workers are injured, a health care practitioner renders care for at least one worker, and at least one of the injured workers requires time away from work. The workers may or may not receive first aid treatment.
Fatality	An event in which one or more workers are injured and at least one injured worker dies. First aid and health care practitioner care may have been rendered.

As a general rule, the more severe the incident outcome, the more information that you report to the BC WCB. As the amount of information required for an incident increases, the number of checks carried out by the WCB mainframe system also increases, and so does the number of checks and warnings built into the HR system. This means that entering a particular piece of information into the PeopleSoft system may cause the system ask you for several other pieces of information.

Also note that Dangerous Occurrence is the only non-injury incident outcome. The remaining categories are injury-related incident outcomes that have a corresponding injury outcome. Whenever you enter WCB incidents in which there is only one injured employee, the category or severity of the incident outcome is determined by the injury outcome. When more than one employee is injured, the incident outcome is automatically determined as the most severe of the injury outcomes.

This diagram shows how incident outcome is derived from injury outcome:

Diagram showing how incident outcome is derived from injury outcome.