Incident Investigation Our Methods Are Flawed Safety Management

By Fred A. Manuele It would be a rare exception if an outline for a safety management system did not include a requirement for incidents to be investigated and analyzed. And that is appropriate; incident investigation is a vital element within a safety management system. The comments in section E6.2 of ANSI/AIHA/ASSE Z10-2012, Standard for Occupational Health and Safety Management Systems (OHSMS) (ANSI/AIHA/ASSE, 2012, p. 25), describe the benefits that can be obtained from incident investigations: •Incidents should be viewed as possible symptoms of problems in the OHSMS. •Incident investigations should be used for root-cause analysis to identify system or other deficiencies for developing and implementing corrective action plans so as to avoid future incidents. •Lessons learned from investigations are to be fed back into the planning and corrective action processes. As Z10 proposes, organizations should learn from past experience to correct deficiencies in management systems and make modifications to avoid future incidents.