Investigating a workplace accident

There are thousands of accidents that happen in the workplace each day. Employers need to do all that they can in order to prevent these accidents from occurring and to try and ensure that their employees are safe and that they are well taken care of in the event that they are injured on the job. If an employee is injured, you must investigate the accident in order to find ways to prevent it in the future.

In some instances the accidents can be prevented with a few simple changes like adding in extra safety measures or offering extra training to help your employees understand what needs to be done correctly so that they won't end up putting themselves in the way of danger and harm.

There are many instances where workplace accidents occurred due to the failure of equipment. Having your equipment regularly serviced is one of the best ways to prevent an accident from occurring in order to keep your staff safe and to also provide your customers with better and safer products.

An investigation of the workplace accident is designed specifically to find out what is happening in the company that is leading to accidents. You need to use the information not to place blame but to understand the accident and keep it from happening again.

An accident is a very complex thing. It is rare that just one particular thing or person caused the accident to occur as the entire thing needs to be investigated and you may find that a combination of poor planning, improper training, and poor maintenance all lead to the workplace accident. The workplace accident will be investigated to the point that you are seeking out 3 causes of the accident, basic, indirect, and direct. This will refer to the entire procedure of the accident. With a basic accident, it may be caused from human error as one of your employees did not perform their job function correctly. The direct accident is what took place such as an employee being electrocuted when they touched a machine or plugged in a machine. This is the result of the unsafe actions of the person and the problem with the machine itself. Finally the indirect causes are those that can be pointed back at management as you failed to properly train your staff or because you did not pay for the machines to be serviced correctly.

Accident investigators are hired on to come in and ask the questions "how" and "why". They need to get to the root cause and all the other factors that have lead up to this moment as they may find it could've occurred multiple times in the past but it waited until this moment to happen when all the little factors were in place to make it happen. They will also investigate an accident that is reoccurring. It may indicate that not only the machinery is defective but the training is defective. This often shows that your company needs a behavior-based safety training program implemented to help re-train the employees on how to use the machinery or to perform their job duties.

Hiring investigators to come in and examine the accident is the best way to find out what really happened. You want to find people that do not work for the company as they can come in without any knowledge of the equipment and other things that lead up to accidents and they can find out what really happened without placing their own insider judgments and opinions on it (this can happen if you have employees doing the investigating as they may have a grudge against the employee training programs or even the equipment itself.)