Incident Investigations Reports

Most organisations believe that the investigation of injuries is important to prevent recurrence and as a learning process to monitor the overall health of the organisations prevention strategies. A prompt, thorough investigation of any incident, regardless of severity, including "near-misses," is an important part of any good safety program.

In most cases there is a significant gap between this belief and what happens in reality. In practice organisations are generally good at reporting injuries because of workers compensation and insurance concerns but incident investigation is often cursory or too narrowly focussed on apportioning blame.

This often results in many of the causes of the incident being ignored because they are overlooked or do not fit into the scenario required by the investigator. Factual statements obtained by insurance companies often suffer from the problems above and are also often carried out a significant period of time after the accident when the site and circumstances are a distant memory.

Typical incidents that should be investigated include:

• An incident/"accident" which results in an employee injury.
• An incident which results in a "near-miss" is one which "almost" or "could have" resulted in an injury-producing accident.
• An incident which results in damage to property or the environment.

To assist your organisation, investigate accidents and incidents Mentor Services offer the following:

1. Training in incident investigation

2. Professional investigation of major incidents or accidents

3. Preparation of Incident Investigation Reports (for Regulatory Bodies such as WorkCover, ComCare following notifiable incidents)

Click here to contact us for more information.