Incident Management

Every organisation should establish a formal; procedure that covers reporting, investigation, learning and implementing change to minimise or eliminate the road safety risk that they have.

Good practice is to make sure that you have a clear policy and process in place before any accident or incident occurs, that this is supported fully by the Senior Management Team who will review the policy and process formally on an annually.

Investigation Team

Within your organisation have a number of people who can be called upon to investigate an accident or incident, depending upon the severity this may quite small 1 or 2 people or it may require more and possibly outside expertise.

The team should always be independent of the local management team, its aim is to investigate what went wrong, reach a conclusion base upon factual evidence and then report.

Try to make sure that there are a number of people from different disciplines involved and always try to include at least 1 driver. Ensure that they all have some basic incident investigation training with 1 lead member having been trained to a higher level.

Investigation

Any incident investigation must be quite broad at the outset, establishing the immediate cause and then look at all underlying causes, such as unsafe acts, process failures, system failures or organisational failure.

It is important that everyone involved is included into any investigation and that the aim is to effect change that reduces the risk not blame any individual(s)

Reporting

The investigation report must be clear, all the investigation team must agree to its content, the root cause of the incident and any other influencing factors that led to the incident taking place.

Its conclusion must also be fully agreed by the team members before it is presented to the senior management team. If one or more people on the team do not agree with the outcome then further investigation should be done to address the concerns they have.

The Senior Management Team should consider the learnings from the report and identify a plan for change to reduce or eliminate the possibility of a re-occurrence.

Change

The recommendations from the report along with the plan agreed by the Senior Management team should be developed and implemented at the earliest opportunity.

When developing the plan for change consider ;

List of actions to effect immediate / intermediary and long term objectives

Hierarchy of controls to eliminate or reduce

Engineering controls - such as additional PPE / Barriers

SMART actions / Training Requirements and any changes to process as well as clear communications to all staff.