Hundreds upon thousands of incidents and accidents take place everyday, injuring fellow employees. The failure of our equipment, supplies, policies, procedures, and personnel cause most of the work related incidents and are allowed to repeat since most are not properly investigated.
- A thorough incident investigation not only determines what happened, but also how and why the incident occurred. Proper investigations should prevent similar or more disastrous incidents from occurring through recommendations to policies, procedures, personnel or equipment.
- The State Office of Risk Management can assist state agencies with incident investigation as well as train your staff on proper incident investigation skills. The incident investigation training is available as part of the Safety Fundamentals Certificate Program. This training will provide participants the tools required to effectively conduct investigations to determine root cause(s) by using different methodologies.
10 Steps to Conducting Investigations
- Have a plan ahead of time
- Organize the team
- Secure the scene
- Document the scene
- Conduct interviews
- Develop a sequence of events
- Conduct cause analysis (apply methodologies)
- Determine the solutions
- Write the report
- Implement solutions