Investigations

OSH health and safety inspectors investigate the following events:

• Complaints about health and safety
• Notifications of serious harm, including fatalities
• Notifications of occupational disease
• Notifications of incidents (accidents that might have harmed someone).

Investigations are undertaken in order to determine:

• Causes
• Whether action has been taken or needs to be taken to prevent recurrence, and to secure compliance with the law
• Lessons to be learnt, both in the workplace involved and in industry at large, and to influence the law and health and safety standards and guidance material
• If there has been any breach of the law, and the appropriate response.

OSH does not investigate every event reported to it. Most of the resources available for investigation are devoted to the more serious events.

In selecting which events to investigate, and in deciding the level of resources to be used, OSH takes the following factors into account:

• Severity and scale of potential or actual harm
• Seriousness of any potential breach of the law
• Knowledge of the workplace’s past health and safety performance
• Enforcement priorities
• Practicality of achieving results, and
• Wider relevance of the event, including serious public concern.

Employer and employee perceptions of OSH investigation processes pdf file [size: [an error occurred while processing this directive]]. Surveys undertaken by Colmar Brunton in 2003 found that 71% of employers and 67% of employees rated OSH’s overall handling of the investigation as 8, 9 or 10 on a scale from 1 (extremely poor) to 10 (extremely good).