ACCIDENT INVESTIGATION - 26.04.2006

Hard evidence

Reasonable time

If you’re not careful, accident investigation can take far too long, achieve nothing and end up being a complete waste of resources. You can also find yourself investigating minor accidents, which in truth don’t need it.

Tip. A good rule of thumb is only complete a thorough investigation if the individual has been forced to stop work for more than a day as a result of it. If they return to work immediately then the chances of it resulting in a personal injury compensation claim or an enforcement agency prosecution are far less.

The aim of investigation

The main aim of any investigation should be to get to the what, where and why of something happening and to make sure that is doesn’t happen again. Avoiding repeat injuries must always be your first concern. Personal injury compensation claims can follow almost any accident, so your second aim must be to ensure that you complete an investigation report that will contain enough details to satisfy your insurers. This doesn’t have to be a complex, time-consuming process, but it must be completed properly.

What are you looking for?

Your aim should be to identify the cause of the accident and obtain good evidence to identify what actually happened. What you don’t want, and this is where the time goes, are opinions. You need to focus on facts alone; the moment you start going down the route of “this may have caused X to happen”, or “this may have affected Y’s decision” etc. is when you’ve lost track of what you need to identify and this is where you can waste most of your time. Getting to the facts without opinions isn’t always easy, especially if you’re reliant on evidence in witness statements

Tip. Avoid formalising in writing anything that you can’t support with evidence. Stick to the facts and avoid giving opinions. Remember, anything you write may be disclosed following a claim!

Cameras don’t have opinions

If you can, take good photographic evidence as quickly as possible. Your chances of getting to the facts are greatly increased this way. As such, it’ll save you a lot of time and effort trying to decipher between fact and fiction. We’re not suggesting you roll the injured person out of the way, or ask them to hold on for treatment whilst you take pictures of them bleeding, but you don’t want to wait until things have been disturbed so that you can’t identify what happened. When to take these photos will require the judgement of the person completing the investigation, and isn’t something that has a definitive answer.

Tip 1. To make your photographs as clear as possible try and include something which will give the photo a proportion of scale. For smaller things you can use a rule or a tape measure, things can even have someone standing next to them. If you do the latter, make sure you record their height.

Tip 2. Take some pictures of the entire working environment at the time of the accident. This will give someone who has little or no knowledge of your site a better perspective of your operations. But check your photos don’t show any bad practices before sending them.