Advice from the insurance company

The first 24 hours following a workplace accident are critical to your injured employee and to you. What you, as an employer, do during this period can help reduce your workers’ compensation claims costs and, most importantly, help prevent the accident from happening again.
One of the key tasks during this initial 24-hour period is to try to determine the cause of the accident so you can institute loss prevention measures, if necessary. A thorough accident investigation will show not only what happened and how it happened, but also why it happened.

Accident Investigation
The first step—and a fundamental part of the accident investigation process—is data collection. Here are the elements of a thorough accident investigation:
Interview anyone who witnessed the accident.
Take a statement from the injured worker. Have the worker write down what happened and sign and date the statement.
Take photos of the accident scene as soon as possible. If the injury involved machinery, you may need to shut it down to preserve evidence.
Gather any equipment specifications and manuals.
Gather applicable safety rules and training records.
As part of your investigation, try to determine if one or more persons outside your company caused or contributed to the accident. If so, get their names and the name of their employer if they were working when the accident occurred. Call Pinnacol Assurance with the information immediately. We may need to send an investigator to the accident site to gather evidence that can help us recover some or all of our claims payments from the responsible party.

Root Cause Analysis
The key to preventing the same accident from occurring again is to determine the root cause of the accident. By conducting a thorough analysis of the data collected, employers will be able to move beyond the immediate event or condition that caused the accident to the event or condition that, if corrected, will prevent a recurrence.
Following are steps for conducting a root cause analysis:
Review photos of the accident scene.
Read witness statements.
Identify trends (e.g., is there a pattern of the same type of accident involving the same piece of machinery).
Examine the direct (immediate event or condition that causes the accident) and contributing (event or condition that collectively increased the likelihood of the accident) causes of the accident.
Drill down to the root cause. You may determine that the direct cause of the accident was the failure of a piece of equipment. But to get to the root cause, ask yourself if there is something you could have done differently to prevent that failure.

Taking Corrective Action
Once you have investigated and analyzed the accident, you’re ready to take corrective action. Ask yourself what can be changed to make things better. A good corrective action should prevent recurrence of the accident, be feasible, and not create new hazards or risks.