Incident Management

1 - Risk Incident Identification and Reporting

This risk reporting form should be used by staff, students or interested third parties, such as contractors or vendors, to report on issues of concern such as:

• Academic or professional misconduct
• Conflicts of interest
• Breaches of day-to-day controls, such as financial or operational
• Violations of law, regulation or University policy
• Breaches of contract
• Legal risks
• Insurance risks

Any incident, suspected or confirmed, should be reported at the earliest opportunity. For advice in complete confidence please contact the Office of the Chief Risk Officer at croffice@tcd.ie or by phone at +353 1 896 2362.

The incident reporting form should be emailed directly to the relevant departmental head or head of school and should be to the Office of the Chief Risk Officer at croffice@tcd.ie.

2 - Risk Incident Assessment and Investigation

The Office of the Chief Risk Officer reviews all incident forms received. Depending on the materiality or severity of the incident reported, you may be contacted for additional information to assist in the assessment of the incident under review.

The objective of the Chief Risk Officer is to ensure that all incidents are handled appropriately in support of the faculty head, division head or head of school, and immediate risks are mitigated within appropriate timeframes. This includes identifying the details of what happened, who was involved, what went wrong, and what controls failed or are missing (root cause analysis).

3 - Risk Incident Mitigation and Monitoring

Once the root cause of an incident has been identified and agreed with the relevant parties, a set of actions to address the incident will be agreed with designated action owners and agreed timeframes for closure. Where required, additional preventative actions will be agreed and actioned.

The Office of the Chief Risk Officer oversees and supports the faculty head, division head or head of school in the remediation of all issues and actively monitors the closure of open actions to ensure they are completed within the agreed time frames. The Office also monitors the completed actions to ensure the controls implemented are designed and are operating effectively.

4 - Risk Incident Closure

All incidents reported to the Office of the Chief Risk Officer are logged and tracked to completion. Once an open action has been addressed to close the risk and prevent a repeat occurrence, the incident will be closed on the risk incident log. Where possible, the Office of the Chief Risk Officer will notify you of the status of any incident if requested.

Health and Safety Incidents

Incidents that relate to health and safety, are currently reported to your local safety officer, Insurance@tcd.ie and the University Safety Office. They must be notified in a timely fashion to allow for investigation by the local safety officer and reporting to the Health and Safety Authority where required.

The following should be reported to your local safety officer, Insurance@tcd.ie and the University Safety Office:

• Accident
  • Unexpected, unplanned event, in a sequence of events that results in physical harm, injury or disease to an individual, (e.g. a person slips on spilled coffee and twists their ankle).
• Incident
  • Event with or without immediate or serious consequences i.e. where there was an incident but in this particular instance there is no injury to an individual but there can be financial loss or damage to property or any combination of these effects. (e.g. Coffee is spilled and left to spread and wet floors through the building)

An incident report for health and safety incidents can be accessed and downloaded from there: Accident Reporting.

The following should also be reported to your local safety officer:

• Near Miss
  • Event without immediate or serious consequences i.e. where there was potential for an accident but in that particular instance there was no injury or financial loss damage to property, a near miss, a loss or any combination of these effects. (e.g. Coffee is spilled and identified immediately and tidied up to prevent any spread or accidents)

More information on what constitutes a health and safety incidents can be found on the Estates and Facilities page for the University Safety Office or if you are unsure as to what to report contact firstly your local safety officer.

Data Protection Breaches

European General Data Protection Regulation and Data Protection Act 2018 came into effect in May 2018. The office of the Data Protection Officer in Trinity College has published comprehensive information on data protection and the obligations imposed by the GDPR

The data protection policy is located at (https://www.tcd.ie/info_compliance/data-protection/policy/) and information on reporting suspected data protection breaches and a link to the data protection breaches reporting from can be located at: https://www.tcd.ie/info_compliance/data-protection/breaches/. The completed form should be emailed directly to: dataprotection@tcd.ie.

Fraud

Trinity has a separate defined process for reporting fraud-related incidents. More information on this process can be obtained in the University Fraud Policy, the Protected Disclosures (Whistleblowing) Policy, and on the Risk Management website fraud page. This is not an exhaustive list, so staff and students should familiarise themselves with the contents of the policy and the other relevant University policies, particularly the Protected Disclosures (Whistleblowing) Policy.