Incident Investigation interviews

Leading incident investigations Interviewing witnesses to incidents Preserving evidence from incident investigations Conducting root cause analyses Evaluating the results of root cause analyses... 

Employees in the process area where the incident occurred should be consulted, interviewed, or made members of the team. Their knowledge of the events represents a significant set of facts about the incident that occurred. The report, its findings, and recommendations should be shared with those who can benefit from the information. The cooperation of employees is essential to an effective incident investigation. The focus of the investigation should be to obtain facts, and not to place blame. The team and the investigative process should clearly deal with all involved individuals in a fair, open, and consistent manner. 

A witness may have several motives for purposely modifying statements. Witnesses have information that the incident investigation team needs in order to imderstand the incident and determine the causes. They may choose not to tell the incident investigation team all of the relevant information they have. Sometimes witnesses will purposely modify their testimony or withhold information during interviews. AVhat are some of their motives for doing this Usually they are the same as those for not reporting near misses. The most significant of these influences is fear of punishment. 

In most cases, it is imreasonable to tell witnesses that the information provided during an interview will remain confidential. The team should make reasonable efforts to protect the identity of each witness and the information provided by each witness. For example, in reports, the names of witnesses should not be used. However, the report will have to show the sequence of occurrences and the identity of witnesses may be apparent to personnel at the facility. The notes from each witness should not be shown or released to anyone outside the incident investigation team. 

An overview of the interviewing process is shown in Figure 8-7. The interviewing techniques discussed in the following section are generic to any interviewing activity, but have been modified to incorporate specific issues unique to incident investigation. 

Eliminate other distractions from the room if possible. Do not allow the witness to see any documents, such as causal factor charts, fault trees, showing the incident investigation team analysis of the occurrence. This may he appropriate for later interviews when only specific information is needed or a specific time gap is being filled in. 

The first phase of process safety incident investigation involves gathering all the pertinent facts from the collected evidence, whether derived from interviews, site and equipment inspections, or document reviews. At this... 

Incident investigations should very rarely result in disciplinary actions. The team should assume that disciplinary actions are not part of the investigative outcome. Even the perceived threat of disciplinary action has detrimental effect on an investigation and may discourage cooperation during interviews. 

Key technical staff become unavailable for the toll or leave the company. Attempt to interview and extract key information from the persons prior to their departure. Arrange for an overlap period for the key person and their replacement. Train the replacement. Ensure the replacement person is given access to the historical records of the toll contract, technology package, MOC packages, and incident investigations. 

If the incident investigation policy allows, explain to the individual being interviewed that he will not be quoted direcdy without his knowledge. 

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

A critically important skill for an auditor is interviewing. In particular, he or she needs to be someone who can ask open-ended questions and is a good listener. As discussed in Chapter 12 (Incident Investigation) the auditor should listen to what people actually say, focus on facts not opinions, and establish trust with the people they are talking to. 

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. 

Remember the six key questions that should be answered in the incident investigation and report who, what, when, where, why, and how. Thorough interviews with everyone involved are necessary. 

Environmental, Health and Safety (EH S) department conducting the incident investigation Average wage 15.00/h x 8h of investigation, assessment and interviewing = 120.00. 

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. 

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