Accident/incident investigations interviewing

Walkthrough of accident investigation, interviewing victims, determining how and why incident occurred, checking the accident scene, and taking precautions. 

Employers should have trained inhouse teams for investigation of unusual incidents. These include accidents and near misses that could have had harmful consequences. The objective of an incident investigation is to learn from experience, and this requires publication and dissemination of a clear report of the findings. Multidisciplinary teams are better able to gather and analyze the facts of an event. The knowledge of employees who work in the area where an incident occurred is a substantial asset. They should be consulted, interviewed, or made part of the investigating team. 

As mentioned earlier, determining an accident trend analysis should be relatively easy. In principle, at least, it is easy, or it should be however, a variety of obstacles will probably be encountered when trying to determine the current status of safety culture. In the initial chapters, we discussed how an OSHA log can be a guide to potential problem areas. OSHA logs, accident reports, incident investigations, accident review boards, medical records, worker interviews, OSHA citations, and other information can provide a lot of information about safety culture development. 

Accident investigation routines have been improved particularly by the large contractors. The trends are towards more detailed fact-finding investigation as well as interviews to reveal the root causes of the incidents. The pressures from management and clients of the projects as to better safety concern have also improved the reporting of the near-accidents at constmction sites. The best constmction companies now report some thousands of near-accidents and at-risk situations, while only a few lost-time accidents have occurred at their sites. 

Effective observation and interviewing will be adequate for the majority of investigations and, when combined with the discipline imposed by good report writing, should ensure appropriate recommendations. However, there will be certain accidents and incidents which, because of their complexity, require the use of more advanced techniques. A full description of these techiiiques is beyond the scope of this chapter but key points are as follows ... 

Work in steel plants is up to now loaded with a lot of different hazards workers have to cope with. A key variable of occupational safety is the perception of hazards as it was shown in Chap. 4. The study reported in this section was part of a greater investigation on hazard perception in different work settings (Ruppert et al., 1985). It entails extended interviews of employees as well as analyses of hazard descriptions, critical incidents, and reported accidents. 

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