Told Employee to Pay Attention – How’s Your Incident Investigation Process Performing?

Injury prevention process improvement is an on-going challenge, and when combined with limited resources, safety professionals should be continually exploring ways to improve existing processes. A key process to consider is incident investigation. For purposes of this paper, incident investigation is defined as the systematic course of action to help determine causation of workplace events leading to worker injuries or the circumstances that could have the potential to cause injury (near-miss). This paper will focus on the steps of investigating workplace events rather than the various techniques used to determine contributing or root causes. An overview of the workers' compensation claim reporting task will also be presented. Although occupational injury reporting and incident investigation have different objectives, both processes, when deployed effectively, can supplement the quality and outcome of each task.