Driving for Work: Incident Reporting and Investigation
RoSPA has published a new and free to download 'Driving for Work: Incident Reporting and Investigation' guide. It offers simple advice for developing and implementing a comprehensive incident reporting and investigation policy.
Accidents are very costly in human and financial terms but, if investigated correctly, they also represent highly valuable safety learning opportunities. However, many factors can compromise good investigations, such as:
- Only concentrating on immediate causes and not underlying root causes
- A lack of understanding and skill by investigators
- Not using structured methods to integrate evidence
- A tendency to only seek to attribute blame
- Only seeking evidence that satisfies preconceptions and stopping the investigation too soon
- Failure to gather all the evidence (particularly poor interviewing techniques)
- Fear of recrimination and traumatised victims and witnesses inhibiting openness
- Not scaling investigations to the seriousness or learning potential of the accident or incident (investigating everything in the same way)
- Poor communication of lessons learned
- Failure to implement recommendations from the investigation
Therefore, organisations need to have a structured, methodical approach to accident, incident and near miss reporting and investigation, with the right policies, procedures and equipment in place to be ready and able to conduct thorough investigations, with staff who are appropriately trained to do so.
This guide gives simple advice on developing and implementing approaches to incident and accident reporting and investigation to enable organisations to learn appropriate lessons from their experiences.
It is available here together with a range of other useful guides.