Incident Investigations and Enforcement

Question 1

What is a government proactive investigation?

Answer 1

aka inspection or site visit
random or target inspection
less common

Question 2

What is a government reactive investigation?

Answer 2

guided by legal mandate under WHS legislation
responding to issues

Question 3

What is an incident investigation?

Answer 3

conducted internal to workplace (usually by WHS committee)
gathering facts about incidents for accountability and prevention
must report serious incidents immediately to WSH division

Question 4

What are the incident preinvestigation steps?

Answer 4

1. Develop investigation process (what to investigate, who does it, training needed?)
2. Create investigation tool kit (anything needed for investigation, person leading needs to be trained to use it)

Question 5

What are the incident investigation steps?

Answer 5

3. Attend to any injuries (emergency plans, control hazards, protect scene)
4. Gather evidence (walk through, record, interview separately, additional evidence)
5. Analyze data/evidence (find proximate and root cause)

Question 6

What is the Domino Theory?

Answer 6

injuries due to sequence of factors, remove one domino with training or policy to prevent it all
social environment > defects of person > unsafe acts > accident > injuries or damage
easy analogy but outdated
focuses on worker behaviour

Question 7

What is the swiss cheese theory?

Answer 7

similar to domino theory but more factors
work on site > management systems > conditions > people > incident
holes in each need to align for incident to happen

Question 8

What is an incident report?

Answer 8

step 6. permanent record of incident
shows who performed investigation, incident details, factors leading to injury, root cause, recommendations, signed off by WHS committee