Health and Safety, NEBOSH, OSHA, IOSH, HSE.

What should be looked to ascertain the accident cause? What are the steps involved in accident investigation process? Accident investigation initiated with the information collection, witness interview, facts finding etc. Now the main attempt is to be done to analyze the root cause of the accident. Causes are of two type surface causes and root causes. Surface cause is not so difficult to identify. A Surface cause example is broken machine guard lead to accident, removed machine guard lead to accident. Now main issue is to ascertain Root cause of the accident. One of the techniques to ascertain root cause of any accident is asking why .i.e. 5 Y’s. Asking why question on the situation can help investigator to ascertain the root cause of the accident. Root causes are the cause which are not apparent or are seen immediately but are the key contributor to any accident. Example of root cause can be management failure, human error, Design failure etc. They are of two types Sy...

How one should conduct incident /accident witness interview? What one should emphasize during incident /accident witness interview? Incident /accident witness is key concerned to ascertain the cause of the accident/incident because he was the one who might have seen all the sequence of the incident/ accident. So it is very crucial to conduct incident/ accident witness interview in proper manner.  There are some guidelines to follow which are as mentioned below: 1-       Conduct interview in a closed and silent room where both interviewer and witness can hear each other correctly. 2-       Voice should be as much as low possible, this will keep witness at ease. 3-       Conduct interview of one witness at a time. 4-       Calm down the upset or angry or emotion full witness. This will serve two purposes; witness get ease and also he/she can remember the...

Accident investigation is an essential element of health and safety. It requires to be done in correct manner so as to fulfill the purpose (Root cause elimination, accident prevention etc). Ideally accident investigation to be done by the person who is familiar with the process of the organization. It means if an accident happened in a petroleum storage then most suitable person to do accident investigation is anyone expert from petroleum processing. Also in combination to a process expert, it is desirable that same person should be expert in accident causation, part of accident investigation team previously. However such type of expert is very rare and not easily available. So below are the recommendations for “Who should do the accident investigation” in such cases where above mentioned experts are not available: Joint team formation for accident investigation. This team should includes one person from management who is aware about the accident involved process, pe...

Why should accident be investigated? Is there any guidance document for accident investigation? Accident term is defined as unplanned or undesired event lead to injury. Incident term is defined as unplanned or undesired event may be results into injury, no injury or property loss. Few organisations investigate all incidents (both accident and near miss) either minor or major. Some organisations prefer to investigate reportable incident (Reportable as per local law). However it is better to investigate each and every minor incident because as per domino’s theory these one of the minor incident ultimately results into major one. Reasons for accident investigation 1-       Prime reason for doing accident investigation is to ascertain the root cause, eliminate the root cause or apply hierarchy of controls in the form of corrective and preventive actions to prevent recurrence in future. 2-       Accident investigation poin...