Construction occupational safety and health incident reporting, recording, monitoring and management in Uganda

The construction industry is prone to many Occupational Safety and Health (OSH) incidents and responsible for high fatality of workers. Despite their high frequency and severity, construction incidents are usually underreported. The level of incident reporting is largely dependent on the nature of the reporting process. In this paper, we describe the current OSH incident recording, reporting, and management process in Uganda and identify weaknesses in the process that provide an opportunity for improvement, which could, ultimately, lead to better OSH performance. The research involved process modelling of the as-is/current process, based on content analysis of existing literature, and verification and analysis of the process model through interviews with OSH subject matter experts. The findings reveal that the current OSH incident, reporting recording, monitoring and management process is comprised of four sub-processes: Workplace Incident Reporting, Management, Recording and Compensation (WIRMR&C); Hospitisation (HOS); Incident Reporting to Police (IR2P) and National Incident Reporting, Management and Monitoring (NIRM&M). Several weaknesses such as: lack of centralized recording of construction OSH incidents; and lack of provisions for reporting minor OSH incidents at national level were identified. We suggest that these weaknesses should be addressed with a national web-based OSH incident recording, reporting and monitoring system.