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The State Claims Agency’s Enterprise Risk Management Section (ERMS) focuses on providing advice and support in relation to risk management structures, insurance, contracts/leases, maintenance of buildings, fire safety, health and safety and environmental management to Delegated State Authorities (DSAs) in respect of the General Indemnity Scheme (GIS).

The National Incident Management System (NIMS) is now live across the majority of DSAs since its introduction in 2014. In the spring edition, Pat Kirwan, Deputy Director and Executive Head of Business, Risk and Operations spoke of the State Claims Agency’s (SCA’s) objective to work with stakeholders to get the best out of the NIMS tool and assist in reducing risk and claims against each DSA and the State overall.

The ERMS is pleased to announce that a number of risk initiatives have been launched in respect of this strategy, in particular; risk reviews and quarterly risk and claim status reports.

Incident and claim risk reviews

The benefits of NIMS is far reaching and extend beyond each DSA’s use to that of the SCA’s ERMS. The NIMS ‘incident and claim risk review’ module assists the ERMS in achieving its objectives to monitor and reduce your organisation’s risk exposure that may give rise to claims through sophisticated alert functionality. Once a DSA reports an incident on NIMS, the ERMS is promptly alerted and conducts reviews of all major/extreme rated incidents and new claims. Typically, the ERMS monitors risks and trends at a National level to inform its initiatives. This new ‘‘on the ground’’ approach will enable the Agency to work directly with a more widespread group of local subject matter experts within each DSA.

As part of this new initiative, the ERMS will be contacting relevant individuals within your organisation regarding these reviews via an incident and claim risk review letter. If you receive a risk review letter, it will require a response, using the NIMS incident investigation page, to provide further details on the results of any follow-up investigation e.g. contributory factors, mitigating controls etc.

By completing the NIMS incident investigation page, you will be capturing the conclusion and recommendation in the aggregate. This will be a rich vein of information in providing lessons learned that will steer continuous improvement for your organisation.

Quarterly Risk and Claim Status Reports

At this stage, your organisation may have received quarterly risk and claim status reports. The purpose of these reports is to provide key Management Information (MI) in respect of your organisation’s incident and claims activity.

Designed by the ERMS, the quarterly risk status report focuses on a number of risk management key performance indicators (KPIs) to include the following;

  • on-site reporting of incidents
  • claims previously reported as incidents (CPRI)
  • number of days to report
  • lost days
  • investigations completed and
  • claims received

In order to improve and encourage incident reporting rates, the ERMS is focusing particularly on the ‘‘CPRI’’ KPI. The “CPRI” illustrates performance in respect of the number of Claims which have been Previously Reported as Incidents. It is a focus for the ERMS to develop a base line benchmark across each DSA.

Whilst incident numbers alone are not sole indicators of good reporting, the CPRI KPI is an effective indicator of the quality of reporting. The ERMS recognises that there are some incident types which are not known or may not be made known to your organisation prior to a claim arising. In light of this, a CPRI of 100% is unlikely, however the ERMS urge DSAs to encourage optimal reporting levels to improve current CPRI.

Article by: Katie Nugent, Enterprise Risk Manager, State Claims Agency

Fig 1: Example of incident and claim risk review letter and response
Fig 1: Example of incident and claim risk review letter and response

The ERMS hopes you will find these newly established initiatives beneficial for the management of risk within your organisation. These valuable outputs justify the correct use of NIMS and should further encourage its use. The ERMS will continue to focus its efforts on embedding risk management practices in 2017 with a particular emphasis on local investigations, and assisting DSAs in the use of their NIMS dashboards to better manage incident response, investigation, assignation and tracking.

If you would like to express interest in your organisation getting direct access to NIMS to avail of the benefits of the risk management functionality, please contact the ERMS on 01 238 4900 or stateclaims@ntma.ie where we can assist you further.

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