Objective: Incident investigation is one of the most fundamental safety and health tools. It is generally present even in the most stagnant of organizational safety cultures. Trying to change the safety culture of an organization can be a daunting challenge to even the most seasoned of safety and health professionals. Moving culture in the right direction requires either vision or pain. What if there was a tool that could capitalize on both? The OGP published the "Guide to Selecting Appropriate Tools to Improve HSE Culture" in 2010. While they took the approach of picking tools that fit the existing safety culture, whatever it happened to be, this approach looks at what incident investigation tools might actually move the culture forward based on either a vision or pain - and what better way to capitalize on organizational pain than after an incident? Investigation tools then become the proverbial "camel's nose under the tent" to push the culture forward. Methods & Procedures: The steps of the HSE Culture Ladder, along with their respective definitions, in the IOGP Report 435, A Guide to Selecting Appropriate Tools to Improve HSE Culture were reviewed. Since the descriptions of investigation tools and processes in the report are minimal, a review was performed of best practices in incident reporting, investigation and root cause. Each of these practices was reviewed in light of the general HSE Culture Ladder step descriptions and these tools then placed in one of the levels. For each level of the HSE Culture Ladder, detailed descriptions of how the various incident reporting, investigation, and root cause analysis tools would be used at the respective levels were written. Results & Conclusions: The result was a tool with which an existing incident reporting, investigation and root cause analysis program can be reviewed to determine what level on the HSE Culture ladder the program falls. This provides a very good indicator of where the overall company safety and health culture would likely fall, since so many of the programs found in incident reporting, investigation and root cause analysis touch and integrate with so many other programs that significantly affect safety and health culture. The tool also provided a road-map of progressive implementation steps a company can use to move forward their incident reporting, investigation and root cause analysis programs.
展开▼
