Incident Investigation — Alberta OHS
Under Alberta OHS legislation, employers must investigate all incidents — including near misses — to identify root causes and implement corrective actions. Serious incidents must be reported to Alberta OHS and investigated using a formal process. Investigation records must be kept and made available to OHS officers on request.
Incident investigation is one of the most important — and most often done poorly — elements of a safety program. The purpose of an investigation is not to assign blame. It is to understand what happened, why it happened, and what needs to change so it does not happen again.
What must be investigated in Alberta
Alberta OHS legislation requires employers to investigate all incidents that result in injury or illness, all incidents that could have resulted in serious injury (near misses), and all incidents involving dangerous equipment failures or structural collapses.
Serious incidents — fatalities, critical injuries, and certain dangerous occurrences — must also be reported to Alberta OHS immediately and investigated using a formal process. The investigation report must be submitted to OHS within a specified timeframe.
Root cause vs immediate cause
Most investigations stop at the immediate cause — the worker slipped, the equipment failed, the procedure was not followed. Root cause investigation goes deeper: why did the worker slip (wet surface, wrong footwear, rushing)? Why was the equipment not maintained (no maintenance schedule, parts not available, no one responsible)?
Corrective actions that address only the immediate cause are likely to result in a repeat incident. Corrective actions that address the root cause change the system.
Investigation records and COR audits
COR audits review incident investigation records as evidence that the employer's safety system is functioning. Auditors look for: evidence that all incidents were investigated, evidence that root causes were identified, evidence that corrective actions were assigned and closed out.
The most common gap found in audits is corrective actions that were identified but never verified as complete. An investigation that ends with 'action assigned' but no follow-up is not a complete investigation.
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