What are mandatory registrations?
Records preserve evidence of activities and results of the Peruvian occupational safety and health system. Their basic relationship is outlined in Article 33 of the Regulations of Law 29783. They should be distinguished from documents that establish criteria or plans: a procedure describes how to act, while a record documents what occurred when an activity was carried out.
Preventive documentation loses its usefulness when it only contains empty forms or files without context. Each record should clearly identify the activity, its date, and the information necessary for its interpretation. The goal is to support prevention and compliance verification, not to accumulate paperwork that is difficult to retrieve when a decision needs to be made.
What subjects must be registered
The regulations cover accidents, occupational illnesses, dangerous incidents, and other incidents, including investigation and corrective measures; medical examinations; monitoring of agents and risk factors; internal inspections; statistics; safety and emergency equipment; induction, training, drills, and simulations; and audits. This information should be reviewed in light of the specific requirements applicable to the activity.
This diversity makes it advisable to organize responsibilities. The person administering training may prepare different information than the person coordinating monitoring or equipment maintenance. A common system should allow for linking these documents without erasing their individual characteristics. It is also important to check if an activity generates multiple linked records, to maintain consistency and prevent discrepancies in dates, people, or conclusions between documents about the same event.
Minimum information and reference formats
Ministerial Resolution 050-2013-TR approves reference formats that include the minimum information required for records. While these formats are reference-only, they allow for adaptation of the presentation, but the required information cannot be omitted. Before redesigning a form or transferring it to a platform, it is advisable to verify, field by field, what information must be retained and how its content will be validated.
A well-designed form distinguishes between required data, observations, and subsequent actions. Ambiguous fields that conflate cause, consequence, and measure should be avoided. If people record data in inconsistent ways, the resulting data will be unreliable. Clear instructions and a review process help improve data quality from the moment of data entry.
Conservation and availability
Article 35 establishes a twenty-year retention period for occupational disease records, ten years after the event for accident and dangerous incident records, and five years after the event for all other records. It also mandates active archiving for the last twelve months and subsequent passive archiving. Other applicable obligations must be reviewed before establishing a final retention policy.
Preservation doesn’t mean storing files without the ability to retrieve them. It’s important to define location, responsible party, classification, and access controls, especially when software or vendors change. A migration must maintain the legibility and relationships between documents. The loss of links or attachments can leave a seemingly available record, but one that is incomplete for understanding the event and subsequent actions.
Digital support and information protection
The regulations allow for physical or digital media. Digital evidence must reliably identify authorship, dates, modifications, and related documents. While not all digitization requires the same technology, the system must prevent silent editing from altering relevant information without leaving a trace of the correction made.
Health data requires special protection. The right to access records is limited with respect to individual health information. It is advisable to separate access permissions according to job functions and facilitate necessary preventive measures without indiscriminately opening medical records. Document control should also include backups and recovery mechanisms in case of loss, damage, or system unavailability.
Adaptation and simplified regimes
The framework includes simplified systems in the regulated cases. Its application requires verifying the type of company and the relevant regulations; it should not be decided solely on the convenience of using fewer forms. Document simplification does not eliminate the need to carry out preventive activities or to retain sufficient information to demonstrate and improve management.
In cases of intermediation, outsourcing, and other similar arrangements, the established record-keeping responsibilities must be reviewed. A company may need information about events that occurred on its premises even if the person involved is not a direct employee. The coordination process must define who reports, who records, and how to maintain consistency in the evidence without duplicating or losing relevant information.
Practical example
In a hypothetical scenario, a company records an accident and opens the corresponding investigation. It links the report to corrective actions, assigns responsibilities, and maintains records of implementation. Accident reporting is managed according to applicable regulations, distinguishing it from internal records and preventive root cause analysis.
Months later, an internal inspection reveals that a measure has stopped working. The company reopens the process and maintains traceability of the decision. The record allows for understanding what happened and correcting it, instead of simply showing a closed box. This use transforms documentation into a tool for learning and sustained risk management.
How to check the quality of records
A review can select various activities and verify their integrity, consistency, preservation, and retrieval. It is useful to compare training with its content and participants, an inspection with its measurements, and monitoring with subsequent decisions. The existence of the record is the starting point of the review, not the conclusion regarding the system’s effectiveness.
The results should be used to improve forms, responsibilities, and processes. If data is never used, its purpose may need clarification; if critical information is missing, its data collection should be corrected. Maintaining reliable records makes it easier to respond to requests and, above all, to recognize exposures, prioritize actions, and verify that prevention is producing results at work.
