Team led accident investigation

Teams of employees are more impartial than management when it comes to accident investigation and should be more widely used by organisations to learn from accidents at work.

Safety and loss prevention consultant David Shillito told the RoSPA Congress in Birmingham, that companies should adopt a more team-based approach to health and safety and accident investigation.

Firstly, he argued that the most frequent cause of accidents at work was human error resulting from unsafe behaviour. He said that teams of people trained together in "safe behaviour" do not tolerate individual non-conformity, leading to fewer accidents.

However, a team-based approach could prove even more effective when it came to accident investigation, he claimed.

"It is often very difficult to believe that accident investigation is about safety and not about allocating the blame," said Mr Shillito. "Also, with accidents, you've got to look at the entire chain of events and this can only be revealed through impartial investigation.

"It is very difficult to find an impartial investigator. The team, rather than the individual, can be objective and impartial."

One of the key elements of learning from accidents was "memory" he added. "Corporate memories tend to work only with hindsight, are selective and tend to be limited to less than seven years. Team memories don't suffer these problems and are essential to reveal the source of latent error."

Also, teams are better at recognizing organisational error, claimed Mr Shillito. This, he argued, is because "organisational error often results from failure to understand the detail of hazardous tasks." Teams have "more realistic expectations" and "are often better at recognising problems in the job than are their management."

David Shillito, who has been involved in many high profile investigations including the Piper Alpha disaster and the Kings Cross fire, encouraged companies to use teams to look for simple human and organisational errors leading to accidents, rather than searching for "system causes" first. Teams should also be involved in "continual risk assessment" and the investigation of near-misses.

"Prevention involves stopping unsafe behaviour. This can best be identified and corrected by the team," he concluded.

Earlier this year the Health and Safety Commission (HSC) stopped short of introducing regulations forcing companies to investigate accidents at work, and will instead be issuing guidance on the subject through the HSE. When questioned Mr Shillito appeared reluctant to criticise the decision. "Good companies need better guidance, bad companies need prosecution," he said. He added there was a "balancing act" between encouraging better accident investigation and making the process "too adversarial".

Feature article by Jonathan Thomson