Incident reporting—informing the future of safety

When involved in an incident, you must report the event to AMSA. Your information plays an important part in guiding the way we improve maritime safety for everybody on the water.

The information you provide in your incident report feeds into a large collection of data which we analyse to identify patterns and connections between incidents taking place across the Australian commercial vessel industry.

For example, an incident that appears to be an unfortunate one-off event may in fact be a frequently occurring problem across industry.

The insights we gain from incident reports and other information sources such as inspections, safety management system assessments, surveys, interactions with stakeholders and coronial proceedings allow us to develop more effective safety strategies and better advice for owners, operators and seafarers.

Results can include making new safety information available, rolling out education campaigns or even changing regulations. A pertinent example of this is the safety campaign we delivered after detecting a high rate of incidents among dory fishing vessels.

We looked into how the incidents occurred and identified a problem that could be addressed by better preparation for operational risks. To address this we launched a series of workshops to raise awareness in this sector on how to identify and mitigate operational risks as a part of their safety management system.

The workshops provided an opportunity for fishers to get one-on-one guidance from staff and have their questions answered. We intend to hold further workshops in the future but no dates have been set. Please keep an eye on our website for updates.

We also produced a factsheet, issued media releases, published articles about it in newsletters and magazines and posted information on social media. There has been a marked reduction in incidents among dory fishing operations since the rollout of the safety campaign.

Incident data can also help us provide feedback to suppliers to help them improve a product or service for the domestic commercial vessel industry. For example, many incidents on commercial vessels in Australia are associated with technical issues. If reports indicate a number of incidents involving a particular piece of technical equipment, we may provide feedback to the supplier to improve the performance of the equipment or its instructions.