Irish company, Dialogue Systems, has developed Worksafe, a workplace health and safety software product, which was recently recommended to companies by Mr Michael Nolan, a member of the board of management of AGF/Irish Life Holdings plc.

Designed to make a company's health and safety programme more effective, Worksafe results in a reduction of accidents and associated costs, according to Mr Bill O'Dea, part-owner and sales director of Dialogue Systems. In some instances, it has also led to a reduction in insurance premiums, he says.

The product has modules on accidents and incidents, health and safety training, medical records, corrective actions, safety audits and inspections, while its personnel records can look at the involvement of individuals in any of these activities.

With Worksafe, a company can benchmark different health and safety activities, says Mr O'Dea. For example, it can measure incidents by department, shift, type of injury, or cause. The company could find there is a certain month that was very bad and further pinpoint the problem to a certain shift.

"Every incident should be treated as a potential claim and therefore you must record all the details at the time it occurs. With this system you are forced into filling in that kind of information and it forces real answers," he says.

A company can also scan photographs into the database as a record against future litigation. Moreover, it can access all the data in one place "so if it does get to a legal situation you can review everything as opposed to having to start searching filing cabinets when you get a letter from a solicitor", he says.

"You can look and see things like non-attendance at training courses." This could show certain managers are putting their people under pressure and not giving safety training sufficient priority. Or you could spot individuals who aren't taking safety training seriously," he says. "If there's an accident, you could show the person was offered a training course but declined to attend."

The pyramid theory on accidents states that for so many minor incidents you will have a major accident and for so many major accidents you will have a fatal one. There's a standard ratio between them.

"What a lot of companies are doing now is addressing the bottom of the pyramid. So they're recording all incidents and they're encouraging employees and managers to do likewise. "With our system, you can measure and differentiate between accidents. You might have had 100 incidents but we can see that 90 of those involved no lost time and no injury. And then you look at the other guy and he only had 20 incidents, but 15 of them involved injuries and lost time." So you can identify under-reporting of incidents, he says.

Worksafe's medical module enables standard records to be kept of things such as minor accidents and when check-ups are due.