Incident Investigations and Learning: Methods, Barriers, and Opportunities

Scrutinizing and learning from workplace accidents is critical to making continual improvements to any safety management system. Systematic investigations into where vulnerabilities and opportunities exist can yield targeted corrective actions that prevent future events. Over the last several decades, many frameworks of incident investigation and organizational learning have been developed. Unfortunately, the knowledge on conducting high-quality investigations is dispersed across disparate domains making it difficult for safety practitioners to identify the limitations with existing practice and propose targeted pathways for improvement. This paper reviews the fragmented literature and identifies various key themes that underpin an excellent investigation and learning process within any organization. In addition, a social constructionist methodology was adopted to explore current best practices within the construction industry through conversations with 19 experts from the occupational health and safety domain. The findings reported can serve the safety practitioners and academics with an insight into the state-of-the-science in the incident investigation practices adopted within the industry.

Automated summary

Scrutinizing and learning from workplace accidents is crucial for improving safety management systems. There have been various frameworks for incident investigation and organizational learning, but the knowledge is scattered across different domains, making it difficult for safety practitioners to identify limitations and propose improvements. This paper reviews the fragmented literature and identifies key themes for excellent investigation and learning processes. It also explores best practices in the construction industry through conversations with experts.