Submitting your form online - frequently asked questions

When you have filled-in all the relevant parts of the form, you will need to click the ‘submit’ button on the final page of the form. On doing this, you will get the following screen message: ‘Thank You – your form has been successfully submitted to HSE. Please check your email for an acknowledgement message’. If you do not see this screen, your form has not been submitted, or received by HSE.

If you do see the above acknowledgement message, but not received a copy of the form, the main reasons are likely to be:

• A typing error in the email address field.
• The email address you provided is set to ‘no-reply’ in your system.
• There may be stringent rules that your IT department has set, that quarantine this type of email as a SPAM message. You will need to ask them to release the message and to allow them to be passed through in future.

At any point when filling-in the form, you can view, save and print details. Do not try to do this in the browser window of the form itself, instead and just prior to submitting, select ‘Form Preview’ from the bottom of the form. Within ‘Form Preview’ mode, to save a copy, select ‘save-as’, and the ‘save as type’ option that works best is ‘webpage – HTML only’. The details you save in this way, are the same as the details you will receive by automated email response, (assuming you make no further changes to the online form before submitting).

Please note, although you can view any parts of the form as you work through the filling-in of the form, your details will only be received by HSE when you have completed the final page, submitted the form, and received the message: ‘Thank You – your form has been successfully submitted to HSE. Please check your email for an acknowledgement’.

Any relevant incidents occurring in Northern Ireland should be reported directly to HSE NI.

You can contact your employer (or person in control of the work activity) to find out if a report has been made, as they have the legal duty to report. Guidance on who should and should not report incidents under the reporting regulations (RIDDOR) is also available .

To inform us of changes to the notification of a fatal or major injury only, you can call the Incident Contact Centre (ICC) on 0845 300 9923. Guidance on altering details of forms already submitted for other types of notification is also available.

Certain combinations are not valid as defined under RIDDOR. Most greyed-out options relate to the last two pages of an ‘injury’ form:

On page 4, if an employment status of ‘member of the public’ is chosen, this restricts the options on page 5, as RIDDOR only allows the severity of injury to such persons to be classified as ‘fatality’ or ‘member of the public taken directly to hospital’.

Conversely, on page 4 if the employment status is any except member of the public (that is, they are a worker), then the severity can only be ‘fatality’, ‘major injury’ or ‘over-3/7-day’.

On page 5, if a selection is made where the injured person had at least one of: (a) became unconscious, (b) needed resuscitation; (c) remained in hospital for over 24 hours, then the injury to a worker cannot be ‘over-3/7-day’, and has to be ‘major’ by definition under RIDDOR.

Most of the online RIDDOR forms refer to (a) the geographical area in England of where the incident happened, and (b) the industry classification of the site of incident. The full lists are available as Excel files:

• Geographical Area (England)
• Industry Structure