Effective incident management is essential to providing quality and safe disability supports and services.
This fact sheet is a guide for managers and supervisors about the benefits of good incident management practices for NDIS participants and your business.
Effective incident management practices are fundamental to the provision of quality disability supports and services and keeping NDIS participants safe. Benefits of effective incident management include:
An effective incident management system includes clearly documented procedures that are developed in consultation with participants and workers.
These procedures are understood by all who need to use them, and will support you to:
Detailed guidance to assist you in developing or improving your incident management system is available on our website: Incident Management System Guidance
Prevention is the best way to keep people with disability safe. You need to implement risk management practices and ensure that people with disability are accessing supports and services in a safe environment that is appropriate to their needs.
Effective incident management, together with proactive risk identification, prevention, and reduction, helps reveal the factors that contribute to incidents. It also helps you to identify ways to prevent or reduce future incidents by addressing:
This is particularly important as incidents within a high-risk and complex service delivery environment can have significant and serious impacts upon participants.
After an incident, you and your staff should consider:\
Addressing participant needs
Effective incident management practices include placing participants’ needs at the forefront of risk identification, incident recording, management, prevention, and mitigation.
You can achieve this by:
This Approach:
Good incident management practices show that you are committed to:
Involving participants in the incident management process empowers them and their support networks. It allows them to improve the types of supports and services they receive and the environment in which they receive them. This reinforces the key NDIS principles of person-centred support and responsive service provision.
Effective incident management involves dealing with incidents in a consistent way. This consistency benefits your staff, participants, and their support networks by setting clear expectations around their involvement, responsibilities, communication, and outcomes.
Staff capability and retention
As an employer you are in a strong position to retain and develop staff if you have effective incident and risk management processes in place. It is important to use incident management as a learning opportunity to support and develop your staff to improve service delivery. This will support staff to identify risks, develop mitigation strategies, and prevent incidents from reoccurring.
It is a legislative requirement that registered NDIS providers undergo audits, including mid-term audits where required. In addition, we monitor compliance with incident management requirements (including about reportable incidents), investigate serious or systemic non-compliances, and respond to complaints. Applying ongoing effective incident management practices in accordance with your legislative requirements places your business in a position to demonstrate your ongoing compliance.
All people you employ or otherwise engage (including managers) should:
Below are a list of documents related to this series: