HIRA Register and Incident Investigation Form

Two documents that belong together. The HIRA register is where you decide, before the work, what could hurt people and what you will do about it. The incident investigation form is where you find out, after something has gone wrong, why those decisions were not enough — and feed the answer back into the register. Both follow ISO 45001:2018: hazard identification and assessment of risks (6.1.2), the hierarchy of controls (8.1.2), and incident, nonconformity and corrective action (10.2).

What is inside

Hazard and Risk Assessment (HIRA) Register — guidance on the method in six steps and on the hierarchy of controls, then six grids: assessment details, an example likelihood scale, an example severity scale, a 5 × 5 risk score lookup, risk rating bands, and a HIRA register with two worked example rows (working at height and manual handling) and blank rows.

Incident Investigation Form — five grids: incident report, facts and evidence, timeline, cause analysis with 5 Whys, and a corrective action tracker; a worked 5 Whys example; and a 12-point investigation quality check.

Both documents as a designed, print-ready PDF and as an editable Word file.

Who it is for

HSE managers and officers, supervisors, risk assessors, incident investigators and anyone building or maintaining an occupational health and safety management system.

How to use it

Adapt the scales and bands first — they are an example scheme, and the words must mean something in your organisation. Assess each activity with the people who do the work, score the risk as it stands, work down the hierarchy of controls, and record the residual risk with an owner and a date. When an incident or near miss happens, use the investigation form to gather facts before opinions, ask why until you reach something the organisation can change, and then update the register.

A risk score is a way of setting priorities, not a measurement. Legal requirements for risk assessment and for reporting incidents to the authorities differ between countries, emirates and free zones — check the ones that apply to you.