Incidents - investigation

Incidents should be investigated so that organisation can exactly what happened so that they can

* Understand why substandard performance occurred
* Identify underlying failures in health and safety management
* Learn from events
* Prevent recurrence
* Satisfy legal requirements

Investigations should commence as soon after an incident as possible. The main aim at this stage is to collect evidence. This can be in the form of:

* Information about the scene (photo and sketches of the scene)
* Physical items (equipment, parts, fragments, substances)
* Clinical (samples of breath, urine or blood)
* Environmental (samples from air, water, soil)
* Documents
* Data print outs
* CCTV footage
* Interviews with people involved and witnesses

This evidence can then arranged to develop a time-line of what happened before, during and after the incident.

It is usually best to have a team of people involved in an investigation. This is partly because of the potential workload, but also because a number of skills are likely to be required. There are tools and techniques that can assist in investigation, and competence in these should be held by the team (i.e. by one or more individuals)