Recording incidents, injury, trauma or illness

Critically reflecting on your incident, injury, illness or trauma records periodically is a good practice to include when looking at your internal record keeping and management systems (NQS 7.1.2) to assess the effectiveness, as well as identifying any reoccurring health and safety issues.

It’s worthwhile to check that the method of recording these incidents, injuries, traumas and illnesses is meeting regulations and reflects the context of your service. It may be useful for your service to include further detail where relevant in these forms to support critical reflections.

Regulation 87 of the Education and Care Services National Regulations 2011 outlines the documentation requirements for when incident, injury, trauma or illness take place while children are attending an education and care service or family day care educator.

Quality Area 2.1.2 under the National Quality Standard (NQS) refers to Children’s health and safety and is supported by regulations 87, 177 and 183 of the National Regulations. They stipulate that approved providers and family day care educators must keep an incident, injury, trauma and illness record. Information regarding a new incident must be included in the record as soon as practicable, but not later than 24 hours after the incident, injury, trauma or onset of illness. The incident, injury, trauma and illness record must be kept confidential and stored until the child is 25 years old.

The Australian Children’s Education and Care Quality Authority’s (ACECQA) Incident, Injury, Trauma, and Illness Policy Guidelines give clear definitions of incident, injury, trauma, notifiable incident, serious incident and first aid. If any of these instances take place within a service or is linked and relevant to a child’s attendance within the service, a record should be completed.

Regulation 87 outlines the details required when filling out an incident, injury, illness or trauma report. An example of the form and the information required can be found on the ACECQA website.

The forms must be completed within 24 hours of the incident, injury, illness or trauma.

Maintaining the requirements of regulation 87 promotes consistent and embedded practice in your service.

Resources:
Incident, injury, trauma and illness (acecqa.gov.au)
Incident injury trauma and illness record (acecqa.gov.au)
FDC_RecordKeeping.pdf (acecqa.gov.au)
The Administration of First Aid Policy Guidelines (acecqa.gov.au)
Notification types and timeframes | ACECQA