Over the past two years, our Health and Safety Committee has prioritised improving incident reporting culture, encouraging transparent reporting across the rope access industry.

In 2024, the IRATA incident reporting form and guidance were updated to simplify reporting. Later the same year, we released the Report a Problem, Prevent a Fatality poster, which has since been translated into 10 additional languages and distributed worldwide.

The poster illustrates the fictional incident featured in our safety training videos, Edge and Rope Management and Management and Safety Culture, and highlights the underlying conditions that contributed to the outcome. Had the conditions been reported, preventative action could have been taken, which could have saved a life. To reinforce this message, we have produced a third film to close this video series – Report a Problem, Prevent a Fatality.

This final film winds back time to before the incident, focusing on earlier moments when unsafe conditions were identified by other teams but not reported. It presents two possible outcomes shaped by critical decision points, where action could be taken or ignored.

After the major incident depicted in the first two films occurs, the teams reflect on their own earlier experiences at the incident site, questioning their decisions not to report the unsafe conditions they had seen.

Would it have made a difference?

As the events rewind, it becomes clear that reporting would have changed the outcome.

It would have made a difference.

This video is ultimately about safety culture, where reporting risks, hazards and incidents is expected, supported, and acted upon. IRATA continues to promote a culture where reporting is understood as a responsibility that protects lives, not as an opportunity for blame. Removing fear from reporting matters; unreported hazards do not disappear without action, they are passed on.

While set in a rope access context, the message applies across all industries and work environments:

Report a problem today, prevent a fatality tomorrow.

All of our health and safety videos are publicly available under the news and media tab of our website.