• General Safety

  When should you conduct an incident investigation?

  Posted by Nigel on 2 June 2020 at 12:02 pm

  Employers are responsible for investigating certain incidents or near-misses that take place in the workplace and in many countries, reporting these incidents to the relevant government department responsible for health and safety.

  Why should you bother do this? These investigations help employers determine why an incident happened and what can be done to prevent similar situations in the future, it does not seek to apportion blame and shows the failures in their safety management system that has lead to this incident.

  Examples of incident requiring an investigation

  • Serious injury to a worker or a worker’s death
  • Injury requiring medical treatment
  • Minor injury, or no injury, but had the potential for causing serious injury
  • Major structural failure or collapse
  • Major release of hazardous substances
  • Dangerous incident involving explosive materials

  These are just a few examples of incidents that require an investigation, your industry may have specific incidents such as exposure to ionizing radiation or asbestos.

  The investigation stages

  Conducting an investigation into an incident that occurred in your workplace includes four stages. Those conducting the investigation ideally must be knowledgeable about the type of work involved at the time of the incident but conduct the investigation with an open mind, letting the evidence lead to the root cause(s), not their own possible prejudged conclusions.

  The first stage

  A preliminary investigation is an opportunity for employers to identify any unsafe conditions, acts, or procedures that must be addressed so work can resume safely until a full investigation has been completed. A preliminary investigation and accompanying report ideally needs to be presented within 48 hours of an incident. Remember this is not the root cause investigation at this stage.

  The second stage

  During the period between the incident and the conclusion of the full investigation, an employer is responsible for taking all actions reasonably necessary to prevent the incident from happening again. If you can identify only some of the unsafe conditions, acts, or procedures that significantly contributed to the incident, interim corrective actions may include a full or partial shutdown of the worksite, removal of equipment, or reassignment of workers to other duties.
  

  The third stage

  A full investigation determining an incident’s cause or causes. This involves carefully analyzing the facts and circumstances to identify the underlying factors that led to the incident, the root causes.

  This investigation might be a taproot investigation, root cause analysis, bow tie or fish bone investigation, whatever your companies uses the final results are always the same, the determination of the underlying failures that lead to the incident.

  Key questions to ask include:

  • What factors made the unsafe conditions, act, or procedures possible?
  • Are there any health and safety deficiencies in my management system or processes?

  A full investigation and report should be completed within 30 days of the incident and in some countries the governments set a legal time limit to submit the report to them for review and investigation.

  The fourth stage

  Once a full investigation has been completed, the employer must prepare a corrective action report that describes the unsafe conditions that led to the incident, what corrective action is necessary, and the steps you and your organization will take to implement those actions.
  

  After the full corrective actions have been put into place, it’s recommended you take some time to review them to determine if they have been effective.

  Once you’ve completed the full corrective actions report, make sure to keep a copy for your records. You should provide a copy to your health and safety committee or the worker health and safety representative if your company have this in place. If there isn’t a joint committee or worker representative at your organization, you should ideally post a copy at your workplace for everyone to read (being mindful of any privacy concerns or legal advice).

  Nigel replied 4 years, 6 months ago 1 Member · 0 Replies
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