Improving Remedial Measures from Incident Investigations: A Study Across Ghanaian Mines

Background

Learning from incidents for accident prevention is a two-stage process, involving the investigation of past accidents to identify the causal factors, followed by the identification and implementation of remedial measures to address the identified causal factors. The focus of past research has been on the identification of causal factors, with limited focus on the identification and implementation of remedial measures. This research begins to contribute to this gap. The motivation for the research is twofold. First, previous analyses show the recurring nature of accidents within the Ghanaian mining industry, and the causal factors also remain the same. This raises questions on the nature and effectiveness of remedial measures identified to address the causes of past accidents. Secondly, without identifying and implementing remedial measures, the full benefits of accident investigations will not be achieved. Hence, this study aims to assess the nature of remedial measures proposed to address investigation causal factors.

Method

The study adopted SMARTER from business studies with the addition of HMW (H – Hierarchical, M – Mapping, and W – Weighting of causal factors) to analyse the recommendations from 500 individual investigation reports across seven different mines in Ghana.

Results

The individual and the work environment (79%) were mostly the focused during the search for causes, with limited focus on organisational factors (21%). Forty eight percentage of the recommendations were administrative, focussing on fixing the problem in the immediate affected area or department of the victim(s). Most recommendations (70.4%) were support activities that only enhance the effectiveness of control but do not prevent/mitigate the failure directly. Across all the mines, there was no focus on evaluating the performance of remedial measures after their implementation.

Conclusion

Identifying sharp-end causes leads to proposing weak recommendations which fail to address latent organisational conditions. The study proposed a guide for effective planning and implementation of remedial actions.