The accident book and RIDDOR
Somebody gets hurt on a clean. There is what you do in the next ten minutes, and there is what the law asks of you in the next ten days. This is the second one.
On this page
An accident book entry is an incident that records somebody being hurt. It is the same record as any other incident, filled in further: who was hurt, what the injury was, where on their body, what was done about it and how long they were off. CleanFlo reads all of that and tells you whether the Health and Safety Executive has to be told.
Reporting it from site
A cleaner opens Report something from the More menu, or from the job they are on, and picks Someone was hurt. That third option is what opens the injury questions; the other two are the near miss and the everything else.
They tap where it happened on a drawing of a body, front or back, and can tap more than one place, because a fall usually takes two. Everything they tap is also a plain list underneath the drawing, ticked or unticked, for anybody who finds the list easier or is using a screen reader. The two are the same answer shown twice.
It works with no signal. The report, the photographs and the witnesses are held on the phone and go up in order when the phone next has a connection, so a basement is not a reason for an accident to go unrecorded.
The person filing does not have to be the person who was hurt. There is a Somebody else option that asks for a name and whether they are a contractor, a client or a member of the public. That last answer is not a label: it is what decides whether a trip to hospital is reportable at all.
What the office adds
On the day of an accident nobody knows how long somebody will be off, so the field report does not ask. The office fills the rest in later, on the Accident book tab, from the incident itself.
What RIDDOR says about it
One line at the top of the entry, in plain English, saying whether it is reportable, under which heading and by when. You never type any of it. It is worked out from what is recorded, and it changes on its own if what is recorded changes.
| Heading | When it applies | By when |
|---|---|---|
| Fatality | Somebody died | Tell them without delay. Report within 10 days |
| Specified injury | One of the injuries named in regulation 4: a fracture other than to fingers, thumbs or toes, an amputation, permanent sight loss, a crush injury to the head or torso, a serious burn, scalping needing hospital treatment, loss of consciousness, or illness from working in an enclosed space | Tell them without delay. Report within 10 days |
| Dangerous occurrence | One of the events in Schedule 2, whether or not anybody was hurt | Tell them without delay. Report within 10 days |
| Non-worker taken to hospital | Somebody who does not work for you, taken from the scene for treatment of that injury | 10 days |
| Occupational disease | One of the eight in regulation 8, once you hold a written diagnosis | 10 days from the diagnosis |
| Over seven day absence | More than seven consecutive days off, not counting the day of the accident | 15 days from the accident |
Once you have filed with the HSE, record it: the date and the reference they gave you. The button says Record that I filed this, and that wording is deliberate. It is a note of what you did, not a submission.
Witnesses
A cleaner can name whoever saw it, either a colleague from a list or anybody else by typing a name and a number: a caretaker, a client's receptionist, somebody who happened to be in the corridor. The office takes the statement afterwards and types it against the name.
Who can see it
- You and your supervisors see every entry.
- A cleaner sees the entries about them and the ones they filed, in My reports in their own app. Nobody else's.
- Somebody who filed a report about a colleague sees what they wrote and not the injury. They were the person filling in the form, not the patient.
- A witness sees nothing at all.
The injured person is emailed their own entry when it is recorded. It is their information and they should not have to ask for it.
Keeping it, and correcting it
A report filed by mistake is retracted instead. It stays on file, marked as withdrawn, with the reason you give. The cleaner who filed it still sees it in their own app, marked the same way, which matters more than it sounds: a report that silently disappears teaches somebody not to file the next one.
After three years the entry is anonymised rather than deleted. The names go, along with the injury detail, the dates off and the diagnosis date. What stays is the shape of what happened: the kind of injury, the part of the body, the days lost, the treatment. That half is your safety record, and it is worth more to the next person you employ than it is to anybody who could be identified by it.
What it does to your score
An entry that is reportable, past its deadline and has no report recorded against it spends your whole incidents allowance on its own. That is deliberate. It is the only thing in the compliance score with a legal deadline attached, and closing the incident in CleanFlo does not clear it, because closing something here does not file anything with anybody.
Still stuck?
Open Support in the app and send us a ticket, or email the team. A real person reads every one.