This is an excerpt from the article “Incident Investigation and Reporting” originally published in the. February 2015 issue of Safety+Health Magazine. It outlines how to approach the data collected in a standard incident investigation.

To avoid future incidents you need to put the data you’ve collected to good use by thoroughly and impartially analyzing it. Examine the metrics to see if the incident is part of a larger pattern. At a minimum, you should be looking at data that covers several years of organizational and departmental safety performance. If you are trending in certain areas you can make adjustments to your safety management system.

There are two main types of trends you will notice. A series of incidents that are all functionally identical may point to a problem with the hierarchy of controls, and an engineering solution may be a suitable course of action.

However, engineering solutions are often unable to completely address issues such as slips, trips and falls – or workers making poor decisions, taking safety shortcuts or forgetting to wear their personal protective equipment. A broader pattern of incidents may indicate that your company will be best served by implementing a long-term solution to address human factors in addition to ensuring the hierarchy of controls is sufficiently robust.

Read the full article here.