5.2 The Business Case for Incident Investigations
Some employers may not realize the benefits of conducting a thorough incident investigation. The Canadian Center for Occupational Health and Safety suggests the top reasons for conducting incident investigations include:
- Most importantly, to find out the cause of incidents and to prevent similar incidents in the future
- To fulfill any legal requirements
- To determine the cost of an incident
- To determine compliance with applicable regulations (e.g., occupational health and safety, criminal, etc.)
- To process workers’ compensation claims
- Root cause discovery and the discovery of contributing factors is a significant reason for conducing an incident investigation. Once an employer identifies the root cause and contributing factors, it may result in training or re-training individuals, policy change, signage, PPE just to name a few. An employee cannot work towards avoiding or minimizing the risk of a similar incident without the identification of the root cause and contributing factors.
- Meeting legal expectations and compliance is essential for every employer. A workplace incident may involve government workplace inspectors and, in some instances, law enforcement.
- Understanding both the direct and indirect costs of a workplace incident allow an organization to justify additional safety measures that will eliminate or reduce these financial costs going forward.
- Employers must ensure they have gathered the correct information needed to accurately report workplace incidents to Workers Compensation in a timely manner.[1]
REMINDER. Incident investigation is not limited to employees of the company. Should a visitor (family member, guests, co-workers from other locations), delivery person, contractor, temporary worker, contract employee, or customer be injured at the employer’s workplace, the employer needs to provide the appropriate level of first aid and medical attention prior to the formal incident investigation.
“Incident Investigation” in Health and Safety in Canadian Workplaces by Jason Foster and Bob Barneston, published by AU Press is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License, unless otherwise noted.
- Canadian Centre for Occupational Health and Safety. (n.d.). OSH Answers Fact Sheets: Incident Investigation. https://www.ccohs.ca/oshanswers/hsprograms/investig.html ↵
