accident-book

---
name: accident-book
description: Turns a messy pile of accident notes, WhatsApp messages and half-remembered incidents into a proper accident record, a decision on whether it must be reported to the Health and Safety Executive, and a filed report you can find three years later. Use when someone has been hurt at work, when you are not sure whether an incident is reportable, or when you have realised your accident book is empty and your kitchen is busy.
---

# The record you need before you need it, and the one call you must not miss

You give me what actually exists: a note on the back of a docket, a WhatsApp message from the head chef saying "Marta burned her arm on the fryer, she is fine", a photo of a wet floor, a shift rota, and whatever is or is not written in the accident book. You get back a completed accident record with every field filled, a written decision on whether the Health and Safety Executive has to be told and by which deadline, the wording to put in the online form, a filing plan that keeps the entry for three years without leaving one member of staff's medical details on a shelf where the next person can read them, and a short list of the things that will cause the same injury again next Saturday.

## What it does

1. **Put the book where the burn happens, and put the finished pages somewhere else.** One accident book, kept where staff can actually reach it during service, not in the office behind a locked door that only you have a key to. Then the second half, which is the part almost every small venue gets wrong: as soon as a page is completed it comes out of the book and goes into a closed file that only named people open. An accident entry contains someone's name, the injury to their body and sometimes their home address. Left bound in an open book on the pass, every one of your staff and anyone who walks past can read it. The Health and Safety Executive's own book is designed for this: it is the perforated Accident Book BI510, and HSE describes it as "an essential document for employers and employees, who are required by law to record and report details of specified work-related injuries and incidents". Decide today who those named people are, usually you and one manager, and write their names on the front of the file.

2. **Write down what counts as "fill the book in", before the next shift, so nobody decides in the middle of a service.** The argument you want to avoid is a chef saying "it was nothing" at nine on a Saturday. Give the team a flat list with no judgement in it: any cut that needed more than a plaster, any burn or scald at all, any slip or trip whether or not anyone was hurt, anything a customer or a delivery driver did to themselves on your premises, anything involving a knife, a mandolin, a slicer, a glass wash, a cellar drop or a hot oil move, and anything at all where somebody went home early or went to a hospital or a walk-in centre. Print that list and tape it inside the front cover. Add the sentence "if you are not sure, write it in" underneath. An entry you did not need costs you two minutes. A missing entry costs you the only evidence you will have if a claim arrives eighteen months later.

3. **Get the entry done in the same shift, in the injured person's own words where you can.** Fill in date, exact time, exact place ("fryer station, kitchen, left hand fryer", not "kitchen"), the full name and job of the person hurt, what they were doing at that moment, what the injury is and to which part of the body, what first aid was given and by whom, whether they went to hospital or went home, and who else saw it happen. Where the person can write or dictate it themselves, take that, because their sentence is worth more than your summary, and quote it. Take photographs of the place before the shift ends and before anyone mops, moves the crate or puts the mat back. Note the name of anyone present, because in twelve months you will not remember and two of them will have left.

4. **Now answer the question the book does not answer: is this reportable to the Health and Safety Executive.** The accident book and a RIDDOR report are two different things and one does not do the job of the other. Work down five gates in order. Did anyone die. Is the injury on the specified injuries list. Is the injured person a worker who has been off or unable to do their normal job for more than seven days. Is the injured person a member of the public or a customer who was taken from your premises to hospital for treatment. Was it a dangerous occurrence, for example an explosion, a collapse, or an uncontrolled release of gas. If the answer to all five is no, it is an accident book entry and nothing more, and you write that conclusion down with the date so that the decision itself is on the record.

5. **Check the specified injuries list word by word, because hospitality hits several of them.** The Health and Safety Executive's list includes, in its own words, "All fractures are reportable, except those to fingers, thumbs and toes", amputation of an arm, hand, finger, thumb, leg, foot or toe, permanent loss of sight or reduction in sight, crush injuries to the head or torso causing damage to the brain or internal organs, any burn injury covering more than ten per cent of the body or causing significant damage to the eyes, respiratory system or other vital organs, "Any loss of consciousness caused by head injury or asphyxia", "Any degree of scalping requiring hospital treatment", and injuries from working in an enclosed space leading to hypothermia, heat-induced illness, resuscitation or admission to hospital for more than twenty four hours. Read them against the actual injury, not against your impression of how bad it looked. A wrist fracture from a slip on a cellar step is reportable. A broken finger from a cellar drop is not. A pot wash passing out from a head knock is reportable the moment they lose consciousness.

6. **Count the over-seven-day days correctly, and diarise the count.** The clock does not start on the day of the accident. Count the days after it, and include weekends, rest days and days the person was not rostered anyway, because the test is incapacity, not shifts missed. The trigger is more than seven consecutive days of being unable to do their normal work. In practice that means an injury on a Monday becomes reportable if the person is still not doing their normal job on the following Tuesday. Put a note in the diary on day eight of every injury that sent somebody home, because this is the deadline small venues miss: the person is quiet, they are not in, nobody is counting, and the fifteen day window closes.

7. **Report inside the deadline, by the right route, and keep the proof.** The Health and Safety Executive's guidance is specific on both windows. For deaths, specified injuries to workers, a non-worker taken to hospital for treatment, and dangerous occurrences, "A report must be received within 10 days of the incident". For over-seven-day incapacitation you report "within 15 days of the incident, using the appropriate online form". Fatal accidents and specified injuries to workers can also be phoned in on 0345 300 9923; everything else is the online form only. Save the PDF the form gives you back and file it with the accident book page. One thing worth knowing before you assume the report handles your insurance: HSE states plainly that "Information supplied to HSE in a RIDDOR report is not passed on to your insurance company". Telling your insurer is a separate job with its own deadline in your policy.

8. **Keep every record for three years, and be able to find it in one minute.** The Reporting of Injuries, Diseases and Dangerous Occurrences Regulations 2013 require that "An entry in the record referred to in paragraph (1) must be kept for at least three years from the date on which it was made", and that the record is kept at the workplace or the principal place of business and made available for inspection. Note that the record duty is wider than the report duty: you must record injuries that incapacitated a worker for more than three consecutive days even though you only report at more than seven. Where you did not keep the online form PDF, HSE says the record must contain the date and method of reporting, the date, time and place of the event, personal details of those involved, and a brief description of the nature of the event or disease. File by month with an index sheet on the front listing date, name and one line of what happened, so an inspector or a solicitor's letter gets an answer the same day.

9. **Read the book once a month and turn it into three jobs.** Sit down on the first of the month with the last month's entries and count them by place and by cause. Three burns at the same fryer station is not three unlucky people, it is a station. Two slips at the same door is a door. Write three dated actions with a name against each: buy the longer gauntlets, put a drain mat at the cellar head, move the hot oil transfer to a time when the kitchen is empty. Then write the date you did it beside it. That list, with dates, is the single most useful document you own if anything ever goes wrong, because it shows you were looking.

## Then it checks

1. Every entry has a date, a time, a named place specific enough to point at, the full name of the injured person, the injury and the body part, and at least one named witness or the words "no witness".
2. Every entry carries a written RIDDOR decision with the date it was made and which of the five gates was answered yes or no, including the entries where the answer was no.
3. Every injury that sent somebody home has a day-eight diary note recorded against it, and the note has either been closed with "back on normal duties" or converted into a report.
4. Every report made has a saved PDF or a written record containing the date and method of reporting, the date, time and place, the personal details and a description of the event.
5. No completed accident page is still bound in the open book, and the file holding the completed pages names the people allowed to open it.
6. Every entry has a retention date three years from the day it was written, and the monthly read-back exists for each of the last three months with at least one dated action against it.

Any check fails: name it, redo that step once. Failed twice: say what is wrong and stop.

## Rules
- Public information only.
- Never invent a fact, a number or a quote.
- Anything sent in someone's name says whose name it is.
- Never change, rewrite, tidy up or backdate an entry after the event. If something was recorded wrongly, add a new dated entry saying what was wrong and what the correct position is, and leave the original visible. An altered accident record is worthless as evidence and looks like exactly what it looks like.
- Never decide that an injury is not reportable because the injured person asked you not to report it, because they are agency, casual, on a zero hours contract or a family member, or because the shift was busy. The duty sits with the responsible person for the premises, not with the person who was hurt.
- Never leave an accident entry where other staff can read it. It contains health information about a named colleague, and the moment it sits open on a pass or in a shared drive folder you have created a second problem on top of the injury.
- Never treat the accident book as evidence that nothing is wrong because it is empty. An empty book in a busy kitchen means the recording has failed, not that the burns have stopped.
- This output is a working document prepared for the owner's health and safety adviser, insurer or solicitor to check before it is used or relied on. It does not decide whether an incident is legally reportable, it does not replace a report to the enforcing authority, and it is not legal advice.

## Built from
- Health and Safety Executive, "Specified injuries to workers", https://www.hse.gov.uk/riddor/specified-injuries.htm, updated 20 January 2026, read 14 September 2026: the verbatim list of specified injuries, including the fractures exception for fingers, thumbs and toes, which is the whole of step 5 and the second gate in step 4.
- Health and Safety Executive, "When do I need to report an incident?", https://www.hse.gov.uk/riddor/when-do-i-report.htm, updated 11 February 2025, read 14 September 2026: the ten day and fifteen day deadlines quoted in step 7, the telephone route for fatal and specified injuries, and the phrase "the responsible person" which shaped the third rule.
- Health and Safety Executive, "What records do I need to keep?", https://www.hse.gov.uk/riddor/what-must-i-keep.htm, updated 1 October 2024, read 14 September 2026: the four things a record must contain if you do not keep the form PDF, the note that the BI510 accident book can be used for injury records but not for diseases, and the warning that a RIDDOR report is not passed to your insurer, which is why step 7 ends with a separate insurance job.
- The Reporting of Injuries, Diseases and Dangerous Occurrences Regulations 2013, regulation 12 (Records), https://www.legislation.gov.uk/uksi/2013/1471/regulation/12/made, made 2013, read 14 September 2026: the three year retention period quoted in step 8, the requirement to keep the record at the workplace or principal place of business, and the over-three-consecutive-days recording threshold that sits below the over-seven-day reporting threshold.
- Health and Safety Executive, "Accident book", https://www.hse.gov.uk/pubns/books/accident-book.htm, updated 8 October 2024, read 14 September 2026: the description of the Accident Book BI510 and the fact that it is perforated, which is the reason step 1 separates completed pages from the book.
- Health and Safety Executive, "Reportable incidents", https://www.hse.gov.uk/riddor/reportable-incidents.htm, updated 16 March 2023, read 14 September 2026: the four reportable categories of specified injuries, occupational diseases, exposure to carcinogens and biological agents, and dangerous occurrences, which set the five gates in step 4.

# accident-book

## You are given
A folder of inputs from a UK hospitality business: loose accident notes on dockets and till roll, photographs of pages already written in an accident book, WhatsApp or SMS exports where a manager described an incident, photographs of the place where something happened, shift rotas, first aid kit sign-out sheets, return-to-work notes, emails to or from an insurer, and any PDFs saved back from an online report form. Nothing is in one format, dates are written four different ways, and several incidents are described only in passing in a message thread. Some inputs name people, describe injuries to their bodies and occasionally give a home address or a hospital.

## Produce
Write into an `output/` folder next to the inputs. Two of the files hold personal data and are named so that this is obvious on a directory listing; keep everything else free of it.

1. `accident-entries-CONFIDENTIAL-PERSONAL-DATA.csv` - one row per incident found in the inputs. Columns exactly, in this order:
`entry_ref,date_of_accident,time_of_accident,exact_place,injured_person_full_name,injured_person_role,injured_person_status,what_they_were_doing,injury_described,body_part,first_aid_given,first_aider_name,went_to_hospital,sent_home,witness_names,injured_persons_own_words,recorded_by,date_recorded,source_file,source_line_or_timestamp`
 - `entry_ref` is `AB-001` upwards, assigned in date order, and never reused.
 - `injured_person_status` is one of `employee`, `agency`, `casual`, `contractor`, `member of the public`, `delivery driver`, `NOT SUPPLIED`.
 - `went_to_hospital` and `sent_home` are `yes`, `no` or `NOT SUPPLIED`.
 - `injured_persons_own_words` is the injured person's own sentence quoted exactly, in quotation marks, or empty. Never a summary written in their voice.
 - `source_file` and `source_line_or_timestamp` must point at the supplied input the row was read from. No row may exist without both.
2. `riddor-candidates-for-human-review.csv` - one row per entry, including entries that look like nothing. Columns exactly, in this order:
`entry_ref,date_of_accident,gate_1_death_stated_in_input,gate_2_injury_wording_as_supplied,gate_3_days_unable_to_do_normal_work_as_supplied,gate_4_non_worker_taken_to_hospital_as_supplied,gate_5_dangerous_occurrence_wording_as_supplied,flag_for_review,reason_flagged,source_file`
 - Each `gate_` cell holds the wording read from the input, or `NOT STATED IN INPUTS`. Never `yes`, `no`, `reportable` or `not reportable`.
 - `flag_for_review` is `FLAG` or `NO WORDING FOUND`. Nothing else.
 - `reason_flagged` names the words in the input that caused the flag, for example `input says "fracture to wrist"` or `input says "off for two weeks"`.
3. `day-eight-diary.csv` - one row per entry whose inputs say the person was sent home or was unable to do their normal work. Columns exactly: `entry_ref,date_of_accident,date_day_eight,what_the_input_says_about_absence,closed_or_open,source_file`. `date_day_eight` is the eighth day after the date of the accident, counted as calendar days, not shifts. `closed_or_open` is `open` unless an input states the person returned to normal duties, in which case it is `closed` and the input is cited.
4. `retention-index.csv` - one row per entry. Columns exactly: `entry_ref,date_recorded,retention_date_three_years,month_filed,one_line_summary,file_location`. `one_line_summary` must not name the injured person; use the role and the place, for example `burn, fryer station, kitchen`. This file is the front sheet of the box and is deliberately free of personal data.
5. `monthly-pattern-count.csv` - columns exactly: `month,place,cause_as_described,count,entry_refs`. Counted from the entries, grouped by `exact_place` and by the wording of `what_they_were_doing`. Names do not appear in this file.
6. `exceptions.md` - a numbered list of every entry missing a date, a time, a place specific enough to point at, a named injured person, an injury description, a body part, or any witness line at all, saying for each which field is missing and which supplied file it came from. Also list every incident mentioned in a message thread that has no accident book page behind it, and every accident book page with no corresponding message or note.
7. `accident-record-form.html` - a blank printable A4 form carrying the fields in file 1 in the same order, one incident per sheet, black on white, 11pt minimum, margins at least 10mm. It ships blank. No entry is pre-filled onto it.
8. `README.md` - what was read, the date range covered, the count of entries, and the two filenames that hold personal data with the sentence saying who may open them.

## Rules
- Personal data appears in file 1 and file 3 only. Every other output identifies an incident by `entry_ref`, role and place. Never copy a name, an address, a hospital, a diagnosis or any health detail into files 2, 4, 5, 6, 7 or 8.
- Never characterise cause, fault, blame, negligence or liability. Do not write that a floor was wet because nobody mopped it, that a person was rushing, or that equipment was faulty. Record what the supplied entry says, attributed to the file it came from and dated.
- Never decide whether an incident is reportable under RIDDOR. File 2 flags candidates by quoting the wording in the input and stops there. The words `reportable`, `not reportable`, `must be reported`, `no report needed` and `RIDDOR does not apply` must not appear in any output.
- Never alter, tidy, correct, reword or backdate anything read from an input. If two inputs disagree, write both rows, cite both source files, and list the conflict in `exceptions.md`.
- Never fill a gap with an assumption. An unknown time is `NOT SUPPLIED`, not `approx`. An unknown witness is `NOT SUPPLIED`, never `no witness`, because those are different facts.
- Transcribe an injury in the words the input used. Do not translate `burned her arm` into a clinical term, and do not upgrade or downgrade it.
- British English, £ where any cost appears, dates written as DD Month YYYY throughout. No em dash characters anywhere. No emoji.
- Health and safety enforcement and reporting arrangements are not identical across England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland. Do not write any output that assumes one nation's regime.
- Put this line at the top of `exceptions.md` and at the foot of `README.md` and `accident-record-form.html`: "Working document prepared for the owner's health and safety adviser, insurer or solicitor to check before it is relied on. It does not decide whether an incident is reportable and it is not legal advice."

## Return
The absolute path of each of the eight files, the number of entries recorded, the number of rows marked `FLAG` in `riddor-candidates-for-human-review.csv`, the number of open rows in `day-eight-diary.csv`, the number of entries in `exceptions.md`, and the names of the two files that hold personal data. Do not print any injured person's name, injury or address in this return.