INJURY SOLUTIONS
Workplace Injury
Site Investigations
Guidelines for employers to follow
Throughout many articles, we have discussed what employers
must do before and after injuries occur, what your responsibilities
are and what you should and should not do.
This article continues the conversation about what you should do after an
injury occurs on your job site.
Hopefully by now, you, the employer, has a fully functioning and documented
Return to Work (RTW) plan. This includes a well-documented
policy on instructing and documenting to all staff and especially new
hires their responsibilities in relation to safety, reporting any injuries and
or near-misses and what their responsibilities are in relation to follow up
reporting, getting care for their injuries and cooperating with your RTW
program and their individual RTW plan.
As soon as is practical after an injury occurs, a site investigation should
take place. The first and most important thing to remember is to get the
injured worker to health care first, as soon as it is safe to do so. In your policies
and procedure manuals, you should have a very clear procedure about
who conducts the investigation and what that generally looks like, as each
one will generally be somewhat different as each accident is different.
Steps to follow should be something like these:
1. Secure the scene of the accident without disturbing anything,
as much as possible while ensuring the site is safe for
documentation procedures.
a. Make safe any and all equipment, electrical and/or other devices
or structures.
b. Take photographs of the overall areas, a video and a detailed
description of the occurrence as you know it at present.
c. Rope off or secure the scene with barricades of some kind so it is
not disturbed.
By Clifford Gerow, Injury Solutions Canada Ltd.
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