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Keeping accurate records is essential to making your business successful. Proper investigation and recordkeeping of accidents serves an important purpose: It uncovers information that you can use to make your workplace safer in the future.
Accidents seldom have a single cause. Use careful thought and sound judgment when investigating. Get all the details. Here are some considerations:
1. Question the injured employee and all witnesses as soon as possible. Ask witnesses to draw sketches if they can't adequately describe the scene. Keep asking questions. Don't settle for simple responses such as "employee negligence caused it" or "it was faulty equipment."
2. Try not to ask "Why?" questions. It's better to ask "What?" questions because they're more objective and don't imply fault. For example, "What were you doing at the time of the accident?" (rather than "Why did this happen?") Or "What caused the equipment to fail?" (rather than "Why did your equipment fail?")
3. Make sure you keep all records required under federal and state laws and regulations.
4. Involve staff members in investigating accidents. It makes them feel like they're a part of the effort to make your workplace safe. Conduct confidential interviews and take suggestions seriously. Use employee awareness, acceptance and participation to your advantage. Your ultimate goal is to eliminate accidents. Not employees.
5. After you compile the details and witnesses' statements, use them. Compare the findings with other accidents. Look for patterns such as:
Environment - Are the accidents occurring in the same department?
Type of Job - Do the accidents happen with a certain type of job?
Time - Are the accidents occurring at a certain time?
Type of Injury - Do the accidents involve the same type of injury?
Equipment - Is it always an equipment failure or is the equipment mishandled?
Employees - Is the same employee having the accidents or are different employees involved? If accidents are random, are the employees getting proper training?
Review accidents regularly. Determine the accident patterns you have in your workplace. Then take corrective steps to prevent similar accidents from happening in the future. Prevention efforts can save your company a bundle in fines, workers' compensation insurance and other injury-related costs. For every $1 invested in safety and health programs, some contractors can save as much as $4 to $6 in costs related to workplace injuries and illnesses. It's an investment that makes sense.
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OSHA Collecting More Accident Data |
Federal regulators are collecting in-depth information on employees involved in serious and fatal accidents in an attempt to come up with ways to reduce the number of workplace deaths among non-English speaking employees.
Particular focus is placed on the construction industry, which has experienced a high number of immigrant fatalities. The Occupational Safety & Health Administration (OSHA) is gathering data from about 13,000 firms on specific construction sites and projects. Once the data is collected and analyzed, regulators determine what must be done to improve safety.
OSHA wants to know if some jobs are "inherently" more dangerous than others
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"OSHA will hold employers responsible for training every employee at every job site regardless of their understanding of the English language."
- OSHA press release
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and what factors are involved in immigrant injuries. Among the questions investigators ask after an accident:
Did the fatality or catastrophe involve a Hispanic or other immigrant worker? What was the country of birth?
Was language a possible barrier?
What is the primary language of the worker who died? How well did he or she speak English?
Was the victim a day laborer?
Workplace fatalities across the country decreased in recent years, but they increased among Hispanic and Latino workers, according to OSHA.
The agency has taken other steps to reduce work-related injuries and death by bridging the language gap. OSHA has translated many of its publications into Spanish and launched an interactive Web site in Spanish.
When instituting safety programs, keep in mind that it's not always enough to simply translate materials developed for English-speaking workers, because many immigrant workers have literacy problems in their own languages. For these employees, verbal training and on-the-job demonstrations of safe work procedures are also needed.
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