Incident Investigation & Root Cause Analysis

Most workplace incident investigations end at the same conclusion — the employee made a mistake — and produce the same corrective action: retrain the employee. The incident then happens again to somebody else, because nothing about the conditions changed. This course is for the person who runs the investigation. It covers what an investigation is actually for and why blame defeats it; securing the scene and collecting the four kinds of evidence before they perish; interviewing witnesses without contaminating their memory; causal analysis methods and how to know when you have reached a root cause rather than stopped early; why human error is a starting point and not a finding; writing corrective actions against the hierarchy of controls with an owner, a date, and a verification; and treating near misses as the cheap version of the same investigation. It also covers the one place OSHA mandates investigation outright — 1910.119(m) for process safety — and how the investigation relates to, but is not the same as, your recordkeeping decision. Issues a Migna certificate of completion.