Benefits of Accident Investigations

It is important to have a general understanding of how and why accidents occur, how people are affected by accidents, and how to avoid them. This information should come from 

Lightning never strikes twice in the same place. 

A drowning person always comes up for air three times. 

If your boat overturns, you should swim to shore. 

The first step in saving a drowning person is to swim to them. 

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An apparently high level of effort is required to report and investigate near misses. The costs of this effort are quantifiable. The benefits of these investigations are not as easy to tabulate. The actual number of accidents that have been prevented by improved near miss reporting may never be known. However, organizations that have seen dramatic increases in near miss reporting have also seen dramatic reductions in losses. The root causes of near misses of safety consequences may be the same management system weaknesses that adversely affect operability, quality, and profitability. 

BENEFITS OF ACCIDENT AND NEAR MISS INCIDENT INVESTIGATION... 

Every member of an investigation team learns about problems that precipitate accidents. This new knowledge helps every team member avoid similar situations in the future. If the investigation is appropriately reported, many others will also benefit. 

As stated in section 12-4, the three layers of recommendations for accident investigations include management systems to prevent similar accidents or to eliminate the hazardous conditions. This management system includes the delegation of responsibilities and followup. What are the benefits of followup Compare your answer to the benefits described in the CCPS (1992) reference on p. 238. 

A management system for accident investigations includes good communications. What are the tangible benefits of a good communications system Compare your answer to CCPS s (1992, p. 238). 

Occupational safety and health legislation requires that certain kinds of injury must be reported. The reportable injuries result from serious accidents. Put another way, serious accidents include those leading to reportable injiuies. Thorough accident investigation policies and procedures need to be predetermined to ensure optimiun benefit is... 

This chapter is concerned with the recording of incidents and accidents at work their investigation the legal reporting requirements and simple analysis of incidents to help managers benefit from the investigation and recording process. 

Truly, to learn more about how to prevent injuries from an analysis of an incident, we need to approach the task with a different mindset. It is not "accident investigation"— it is "incident analysis." This simple substitution of words can have great impact. We can get more employee participation in the process and reap more benefits. I suggest the following shifts in perspective and approach toward the evaluation of a near hit or injury. 

Any information that helps give a clear picture of an incident occurrence is important. Accurate eye- or ear-witness knowledge regarding accident occurrences should be accepted from any reliable source. This is the case even when the source may not be as cooperative as one would like. If the knowledge is believed to be accurate and useful, it should be used in the investigation even if the information comes without the benefit of a signed statement. 

We here recommend using graphical techniques in the display of accident sequences on an exceptional basis only. A cost-benefit consideration must be made, where the time and attention needed to establish and analyse the diagram are considered as well. Experience shows that the establishment of, for example, a STEP diagram, is merited in the investigation of accidents involving complex interaction and communication between different actors. 

In Chapter 6, we discussed problems that the investigator faces when applying a complex accident causal model in the collection of data on accidents. A careful balance has to be made between the amount of information required, the quality of the information, and the time needed for the investigation. This balance is problematic, since the benefits of detailed information of a high quality are usually experienced by another part of the organisation than those responsible for the collection of the data. They have first-hand experience anyway. 

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