Last week, offshore wind industry safety body G+ published its 2024 Incident Data Report, its 12th. Commenting on the report, G+ Chair and Senior Vice President QHSE at Ørsted, Lisbeth Frømling said: ‘Transparency and learning from our shared data are at the heart of G+’s mission to drive continuous improvement in health and safety.’

The report captures a snapshot in time of the growing industry. The working hours included in its combined dataset was up more than a quarter over the previous year, to nearly 80 million hours, and for the first time including data from Finland and India.

While the vast scope of such a report might overwhelm an individual, for years there has been a more down-to-earth way of collecting and sharing experiences in the energy industry. It’s one that appeals to our love of stories of other people’s experiences, good or bad.

Toolbox is a free-to-use digital incident lessons platform for the entire energy industry – not just offshore wind. It holds nearly 1,000 health and safety case studies in an easy-to-read and easy-to-search format. To help industry make better use of the information, the Energy Institute launched a further enhancement earlier this year. Artificial intelligence (AI) functionality allows users performing searches to ask questions about the data. What comes back are AI-generated summaries of the top 20 most relevant results, including a list of relevant incidents, the key risks and the lessons learned, as well as links to the sources.

One committed Toolbox user is Graeme Paterson, Global Head of Health, Safety and Environment for Offshore at wind turbine supplier Siemens Gamesa. Before the launch of the G+ report, but after the launch of the AI functionality, he explains why recording incidents matters, and how he uses Toolbox.

Q: What’s the health and safety rationale of collecting records of safety incidents? 
A: The collection and sharing of lessons is critical for fostering a proactive safety culture and preventing recurrences. If you only share stuff internally, it limits the ability of industry to learn and continue to improve. It increases general awareness and vigilance about what is going on in industry. People can become isolated in their own organisation without understanding what incidents are impacting everybody. Toolbox is a superb tool for cross-organisation learning.

Q: How long have you been using it? 
A: My use of Toolbox ramped up about 18 months ago. I work within G+, and around that time it started to put a lot more focus on it to contribute more. Siemens Gamesa has made at least 21 contributions. That shows the extent to which it has bought into the tool. We are keen to help people learn from events that we have had, including injury events.

Q: Aren’t you worried about being embarrassed by the incidents that they report?  
A: There is a risk that by reporting a company might be perceived in a negative way; that is a typical and misguided reporting culture-type mentality. Sometimes there can be a perception that a high number of EHS [environmental, health and safety] reports is negative. But a lot of proactive reports – not necessarily injuries but also high potential events – we can learn from. If no injury came out of the incident, we have been gifted a learning opportunity. I’ve worked hard in our organisation [to encourage] more reporting, which is better for us and others. Having said that, the reports on Toolbox are anonymised; nobody knows who has submitted the reports.

It is absolutely part of me and my ambition, not just in work, but in my life, to be completely open and transparent, and to share and to learn. I was injured in work in a previous employment, and want to help others not to be injured because I see how it impacts your life. There’s no point in hiding things, keeping secret or downplaying them. Just be open, share every aspect of what occurred, and take the causal factors away and mitigate the risks of your activities.

Q: How were you injured?  
A: I used to paddle a kayak for Team GB; canoe slalom was my specialism. I was pretty good, but was injured in the workplace, in a part-time job I had as a chef in between training sessions. It was known that there were leaky pipes in the kitchen, which was notoriously greasy. When I was cooking, I slipped on the greasy floor, twisted my back, and as I fell hit my head on the worktop, knocking myself out. I was badly injured, and out of training for six months, and that made it almost impossible to get my competitiveness back. People who I trained with went on to win medals; maybe that would have been my life. But I went in a different direction.

Q: What's useful about the way that Toolbox shows information? 
A: With Toolbox, you can select multiple languages. We are a global industry, and present in regions that don’t speak English to the same standard. Also, its searchability is super-user friendly. You can search by specific work activities, like drilling, or pipelines, or wind power specifically. Or you can filter by high-risk situations, such as working at height or energy isolation. And now AI will help with that. It’s very easy to use the resource to find specific events that you want to learn or talk about. And once you’re in, there are descriptions, and pictures. It’s a very consistent format, and an easy way to learn; and not just words, there are visuals as well.

Q: How do you use Toolbox? 
A: I encourage the use of Toolbox throughout the organisation. We might use it when someone is starting a shift, to highlight a specific topic on site, as a Toolbox Talk. It can provide risk content relevant to the work being done that day. If there is a specific challenge that we are experiencing ongoing, and I don’t know how to overcome it, or if we have a trend of specific events, or there’s a trend in a way people are being injured more frequently, I can go in and search, and see what has happened in other organisations, and what they are doing differently.

There is the risk of running safety campaigns. You don’t want to inundate people. If you don’t prioritise, people can go numb to safety incidents. People lose interest if you email them every day, to tell them to be careful of this, or careful of that; they start ignoring the content. To deal with that, you have to be selective and pragmatic as to HSE priorities in the organisation. You also have to be innovative and do things differently. We’ve done a safety film campaign. We know that people learn visually more than by reading. A short film that’s inspiring, or thought-provoking, that tugs the heart can be infinitely more powerful than a Powerpoint presentation.

Touching on what I said earlier, there is a stigma around sharing events. People have to understand that it’s super-important to share and be transparent. And when you submit to Toolbox, it will be anonymous, to encourage people to report more, to offer greater learnings. Still, a lot of organisations don’t share what they could, and should be encouraged to use more where they can, and where they are able by the rules of the organisation. We should try to prevent legal arguments from being a barrier to industry learning.