Posted By John Ewing Hi, I am looking for some ideas on how to encourage supervisors to produce quality accident investigations. At present they seem unable or unwilling to go that extra bit to discover the true cause of the accident or even produce evidance on simple investigations. We have tried using discipline but although it works for a time the threat of it soon wears off. Does anyone have any training material that could be used for this or any ideas on how to encourage supervisors to produce quality accident investigations. All the supervisors have been trained on a two day investigation course that is IOSH accredited. Any help would be welcomed Thanks John

Posted By John Ewing John, Thanks, unfortunately we have been down all those avenues previously. We are a large distribution company with over 1200 employee's on my site with seven other sites of similar size and numerous third party sites, there is no time limits on how long an investigation will take and as we employ over 70 supervisors at my depot alone there is always cover for the job. We do employ Safety Advisors at all our sites, however I cant investigate all accidents. John

Posted By Kieran J Duignan John There is an approach to this that uses language more carefully to facilitate personal responsibility. For example, 'incident analysis' instead of 'accident investigation', and 'empowerment' and 'self-discipline' rather than merely 'discipline' and 'enforcement'. The approach is 'Total Safety Culture' and is explained brilliantly in 'Working Safe' by Scott Geller. It adds 'the person' to behavioural safety and will solve your problem if you apply it.

Posted By Liam Nolan Have you thought of having the employee safety rep do the investigation? After all, it possibly their co worker that has been injured (or nearly injured). You could invest training in these people to investigate accidents and they would have good motivation in concluding the investigation. They would have to be enpowered by management to have he authority to conduct the investigation. If you have that many workers on each site then they would also have cover for their normal duties. You say that you can't investigate each accident. You must however have an idea on what the most common thye of accident is. For instance is the most likely accident involving forklifts or other type of plant? (you say you are in a distrabution buisness?) I understand that you can't investigate each accident, but you may have initial reports on the event of an accident which would indicate the mechanisim or causation of the incident/accident. This should lead you to identify if the operator training is deficent, thus indicating increased training requirements (prevention). Also, surely the cost of insurance or loss of production costs would outweigh the cost of training along the lines I have suggested above?