• Make a Safe Workplace Overview
• Manage health and Safety
  • Safety of Contractors and Visitors
  • Visitors to Farms
  • Children in the Workplace
  • First Aid Kits
• Make a H&S plan
  • Implementing Your Plan
  • Employee Participation
• Manage Hazards
  • Monitor Employee Health
  • More on health monitoring
  • Personal Protective Equipment
  • Getting staff to wear safety gear
  • Fatigue, Drugs and Alcohol
  • Sample Drug and Alcohol Policy
  • Workplace Fatigue
• Manage Staff Safely
  • Employee Responsibilities
  • Employee Capability Levels
  • Seven Steps for Training
  • Sample Health and Safety Policy
• Investigate Incidents

Investigate Incidents

Accidents can have a devastating effect on a small business so it’s important to record and investigate incidents in your workplace to stop them happening again. You have a legal obligation to report accidents that cause serious harm to the Department of Labour.

What you must do

If you are an employer, self-employed, or in charge of a contractor or subcontractor, you must:

• Manage hazards before accidents or incidents happen. If harm occurs then it’s important to systematically record, investigate and respond to the event.
• Keep an up-to-date register of workplace accidents and incidents. Your accident register must include all accidents or incidents that harmed or might have harmed (a near miss) any person at work.
• Complete an accident reporting form [pdf 29kB] for all accidents or incidents.
• Investigate the cause of all accidents or incidents so you can take steps to manage the hazard.
• Keep a copy of the written notice in your accident register.
• Call the Department of Labour and report any serious harm incidents as soon as possible, and then send in your written notice within 7 days using the accident reporting form [pdf 29kB].

What you could do

• Work through the ‘Incident Investigation’ section of Emergencies and Incident Investigation [pdf 250kB] to assess how well you are handling incidents and injuries.
• Investigate near misses to identify the hazard that lead to the near miss so you can prevent future injury from that hazard.
• Make sure that at least one person in your workplace is trained in first aid. Keep the first aid kit fresh by immediately replacing anything that’s used and checking expiry dates on items. Maintaining your first aid kit can be listed as one of the responsibilities of your health and safety representative or a trained first aider.
• Plan you emergency responses in advance then practice what to do if someone gets hurt. These practices are a great team building exercise.
• Ensure you have recorded the emergency contact details for each employee in their confidential file.
• Accident Registers can be kept in various ways provided they contain all the required details. You could use the accident reporting form [pdf 41kB] to record the details of all accidents and keep a copy of each completed form in an accident register file to meet your record-keeping obligations.
• The details in your Accident Register should feed into your hazard management process. They can be used to describe and analyse accidents and think about how to eliminate or manage the risks involved to prevent reoccurrence of the accident.