HSE 184 Learning from incidents

Effective learning from incidents (LFI) is critical for safe working. The reasons leading to many of our health, safety and environmental (HS&E) incidents are not new. Incidents are often repeat events or events that are very similar in nature to previous incidents. So the immediate question we ask is, ‘Why have we not learned from these past events and why do people continue to make errors or ignore rules and good practices?’.

Through LFI, organisations gather knowledge about what went wrong in the past (incidents, accidents and near misses) and change working practices to prevent future incidents. But without effective learning processes, or effectively engaging with the workforce, organisations are at risk of repeating the same incidents, or suffering incidents with similar causes.

Learning from incidents provides an easy to use framework and set of exercises that can be used at different levels in the organisation to analyse and improve LFI processes and learning opportunities. The tool is designed to:

• Guide the implementation of LFI initiatives.
• Encourage engaging discussions to deepen the learning from past events to prevent repeat injuries and losses.