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APRIL 2007
Incident
Investigations
We all
know what an incident investigation is. We have also heard things like,
they are a waste of time, that they take too long or that they do not
accomplish anything. So why do we do them and what are the benefits?
We
realize that all incidents and accidents have causes. If we can
determine the causes of an incident or accident, we can then implement a
control action that can eliminate future incidents or accidents.
Therefore direct or indirect causes are discovered by doing the
investigation.
The
benefits now become a little more obvious. We may prevent a future
incident or accident. There is also the improvement in employee morale
when they are involved in an investigation that produced positive
results by upgrading engineering or processes. Benefits for management
can be improvement of management skills that help improve health and
safety performance throughout the organization and also the prevention
of business losses after a serious event? Everyone benefits.
The
bottom line is that the incident investigation is critical in our safety
process. It's one of the best tools we have to manage our safety
future. We need to also realize that it is a tool designed to discover
cause or multiple causes and not access blame. Blame is generally the
easy answer, where as a quality and in depth investigation will provide
answers as to why a decision was made or why a method may have been
used.
I have
never believed that people come to work and expect to have an accident.
Sometimes because of circumstances, belief systems or outdated methods
and processes, that have not yet produced an incident or injury, we make
decisions that have a bad outcome. Without the incident investigation
process we would never have the opportunity to improve the process or
the environment. We would simply continue to operate as we always have
and wait until the inevitable happens and then react.
Rolf Laurin
USW-Local 338
Safety and Health Chair
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