Accident Investigation Loss Theories Flashcards
Reporting Requirements
- record & notify all occupational accidents and suspected cases of occupational ill health & disease
- inform employees about the recording and notification of the system
- maintain records and use them to help prevent a recurrence
Why Investigate accidents
- to identify & prevent recurrences (immediate & underlying causes)
- for insurance reasons - civil claims - criminal prosecution
- to maintain the morale of staff - shows management commitment
- to maintain good PR
- useful for costing accidents
- identify trends
- identify the need to review risk assessments and SSOW
Arrangements employers should have in place for notifying incidents
- competent person - responsible for reporting accidents and other reportable incidents
- if a shared workplace an agreement is needed for who accepts the responsibility of reporting
- all incidents must be investigated by a competent person
- information on accidents is communicated to workers
- workers are informed of the system and what is expected of them and why co operation is important
- records kept confidential
steps to an investigation
- gathering the information =
- analysing the information = establish the intermediate and underlying cause
- identify control measures
4 action plan and implementation
incident investigation evidence
photos / sketches / measurements / graphs /charts / cctv / condition of equipment involved / procedures in place / environmental factors / witness statements
people to be interviewed in an investigation
- injured person - what happened
- witness - what they observed
- technical specialist - specialist knowledge on the process involved
- medical - who attended the scene and treated the injured person
- manager - knowledge of process involved
when an interview should be conducted
- as soon as possible
- who needs to be interviewed
- who is conducting the interview
- how will the interview will be recorded
- gather all the evidence and info
format of report & lessons learnt
requirements for taking a witness statement
- planning
- as soon as possible
- safe / comfortable / relaxed location
- interview 1 witness at a time
- offer someone to accompany them
- introduce yourself and why the investigation is taking place
- during the interview
- outline the reason for the interview (no blame)
- agenda
- develop a rapport with the witness - put them at ease - use clear & simple language
- take notes
- use photos / diagrams to help the witness remember information
- after the interview
- sum up what was said (agreed at the inteview)
- outline the next steps
the difficulties in finding the true costs of accidents
- difficult to define the scope & minimum level
- incident must be analysed
- under reporting - many accidents are not reported
- indirect costs for things such as good will
- insufficient time to complete the exercise
- long delay for some costs - such as court costs
Domino Theory - Hienrich 5 step model
- series of events that lead to an accident, this is extended by bird & loftus to include the influence of management
- benefits - adds a structure to investigations and bird & loftus encourages the search for an underlying cause
- limitations - simplistic & straight chain thinking which focuses on the immediate cause this restricts the search for multiple causes
- single cause theory - preventable injury is a natural culminate of a series of events
- if one domino / event is removed then the chain is stopped
multi cause theory
- multiple causes to an event - underlying cause
- link between event and number of causes & probability
- benefits = searches for multiple failures and uses a systematic accident analysis technique
- illustrate with a fault tree
lost time accident rate (accident/incident rate)
number of work related injuries / average number of persons employed x 1000
accident severity rate
total number of days lots / man hours x 1000
accident frequency rate
number of work related injuries / total number of man hours x 100,000
