“Safety, Accidents, and Investigations: Be Prepared for the Unexpected,” by Robert A. Battles. 2011.
Critic by
Idy Kool
Columbia Southern University
MOS 5101, Safety and Accident Prevention.

The main focus of the author in this article was about accident prevention. In the article, the author describes how to establish and maintain an accident prevention plan, responds to accidents in the workplace, and how to handle potential external investigations.
The authors intended audience is the employer and its employees. Every employer that does work in the United States is subject to the safety and health laws issued by the Occupational Safety and Health (OSHA) or the equivalent state programs. (Battles 2011). This article clearly emphasizes on the need of any organization to be readily prepared in an event of an incident and future investigations.
A lot is involved when analyzing potential hazards and developing an accident prevention plan that will prevent and reduce the cost of an accidents. The author explains how developing this plan can play a vital role in accident prevention and how important it is to adhere to the plan. As stated, Accident prevention plan is the core of any safety program, it will define potential safety issue in the workplace and outline how to reduce or eliminate those issues. (Battles 2011, page 1). Every organization must ensure it workplace and surrounding environment are free from anything that could potentially lead to an accident. Steps such as involving the employees from every level of the organization to develop a safety plan in order to pin point areas with safety issues is highly recommended. This will help the team to understand the safety issues in every department and ways that it could be tackled.
Assessing the job performance of the employees also play a role in preventing workplace accident. This gives the safety team a raw idea of where a potential injury could occur or where injuries have been occurred in the past. (Battles 2011, page 3). Finally, Training is strongly encouraged at all levels because without proper training, the plans being laid out cannot be properly executed. Training should be the key in every accident prevention plan and both managers and every employee should be involved. Training definitely should be carried out when an individual at any job is hired and when his or her job description changes in a new role. Working in a particular company in the same department for many years doesn’t really mean that an individual is conversant in another department within the same organization if transferred to work there. Proper training should be ensured and without this training, these individuals should not be allowed to work in their new role to avoid any potential accident. All training should be documented and possibly placed in all employees’ files to ensure every employer is current on their trainings.
Every organization should be readily prepared for any kind of accident investigation because accident could happen at any time. Management is to play a key role in accident investigations by ensuring that all emergency plans are being put in place. According to the author, being prepared allows you to immediately put the emergency plan into action, confidently addressing the needs of all who are impacted and avoiding missing key elements. (Battles 2011, page 4). This basically means that once you are fully prepared, it will be easy to tackle or manage a form of accident that was to occur. They response time will be timely and any possible confusion in the case of an emergency will be clearly eliminated because the company had planned ahead.
In the case where you have investigators coming to investigate a particular accident, always contact the legal department of the company first to seek legal advice on what proper documents that needs to be released to the investigators.
The article touched all facets of accident investigation and ways to prevent accidents from occurring. I could not think of any other way the article could have been improved as it was well written by the author. I was able to apply a lot from this article to some of my current course work as well as my place of employment.

“Safety, Accidents, and Investigations: Be Prepared for the Unexpected,” by Robert A. Battles. 2011.