Incident

Incident is the umbrella term covering near-misses, first-aid cases, recordable injuries, lost-time injuries, fatalities, and environmental releases. OSHA uses the phrase "injury or illness" for the work-related recordable subset, and the broader category — including property damage and process upsets — is what a QEHS platform has to track as one population so that the safety program and the environmental program read from the same record.

The reason the umbrella matters is that the categories share an investigation path. A near-miss, a recordable injury, and a fatality on the same hazard are the same failure at different outcomes, and the corrective-action discipline that closes one should close all three. Classifying an incident correctly — recordable versus first-aid, lost-time versus restricted, environmental versus safety — is what feeds TRIR, DART, and LTIR accurately, and misclassification is one of the most common findings an OSHA inspector writes. See near-miss, CAPA, and root cause analysis.