Steven Carter, H&S Manager (Professional Services) and Training Lead,

I learnt about accident and incident investigation when I was an HSE Inspector.  The first thing you learn is that the immediate priority is to make the scene safe and to ensure anyone who is injured receives the correct level of care (and for serious or traumatic incidents, this includes emotional support to colleagues).

The critical activity is understanding what happened. There are a few techniques we can all use.

• Talk to the injured person and any witnesses as soon as you can after the accident to gather the facts.  A great way to do this is to return to the scene of the accident and ask them to walk and talk through what happened. Don’t be surprised if these accounts don’t fully align, it is amazing how two people can see the same events but describe them differently.
• Photographs and video are such powerful tools. Nearly everyone has a camera on their phone.  Things change quickly and having photos taken at the time can be vital in understanding what has happened.  If the scale is not obvious, you can put a common item in the photograph to give scale, a ruler being ideal.
• Drawings and plans might be helpful. Not for every incident, but there will be times when a plan is really helpful, particularly if the accident had a dynamic event e.g. a vehicle moving.
• It is important that someone follows up with the injured person after the event. We have a legal duty to report certain types of injury and harm. Therefore, we need to know the type and severity of injury, where, if any, follow up treatment occurred e.g. A&E; and any days lost as a result the injury.

This information, collected as soon as possible, provides the basis for determining what happened. From this we can start to analyse the causes of the accident. If we do not have an accurate picture of what happened, these next stages are difficult or impossible.

We investigate accidents for several reasons.

• Whilst preventing a reoccurrence is a goal, it is not the only goal. This goal will not help us learn more widely.  If a machine was poorly guarded, we can improve the guarding.  If we know an injury occurred because guard checks were not completed, we can improve this process across the organisation.
• Collating the data allows us to identify trends. An organisation I visited many years ago saw a pattern of slips in a certain area when it was wet outside.  Someone had changed the floor polish, but without realising this would lead to slips when the floor got wet.  It was only by linking the slips to wet weather that this trend was identified and rectified, but this link relied on gathering the information at the time relating to not only the floor but also the weather.
• To share information, sometimes outside of QMUL, so we can help prevent accidents elsewhere.

The better the initial information gathering is, the better the follow on processes to help us keep everyone safe at work.

If you witness or are involved in a near miss, accident or incident at work, please report it using the MySafety report form.

For further advice and guidance on accident and incident reporting, please visit our topic page or contact a member of our team.