Accident Analysis

Log and analyze accidents on a periodic basis. Look for trends by such characteristics as type of injury, department, location, job position, length of employment, accident cause, etc. The safety committee should complete and review a loss analysis report at least quarterly. Proper action should be taken to address the most frequent and severe injury trends.

Complete a detailed loss analysis annually. From this write safe workplace objectives for the coming year.

Accident Log

Create a log as a paper or electronic spread sheet. The electronic version has the advantage of easily creating reports based on specific fields. For instance, it is easy to pull all the accidents meeting the parameters: department name, time frame such as 1st quarter or January 1-December 31 or a specific year. Or the search could be for all vehicle accidents involving mini-buses in a specific time frame within a specific facility.

Before setting up the database, think through what types of reports the organization will want and create appropriate fields in the database. Each field or column named will be searchable: one separate field each for city, state, and zip code will allow reports that pull just the city or state or zip or a combination of any of those. If city, state and zip code are in one field, they can not be searched separately.

Fields might include:
Type of injury
Department
Location
Job position
Length of employment
Accident cause

They can reflect all the questions asked in the Accident Investigation Form, or identify the information required by OSHA, NIOSH or other reporting agency. The goal is to simplify the task to collect and tabulate needed data that will help the organization improve its workplace safety.