Standards Development

Scope

An international standard (guideline) to provide a general guide for investigations of consumer incidents.

Consumer incidents are incidents where consumers suffer physical injury or death in the process of using products, services, facilities or the things related to them. Consumer incident investigation means an investigation aiming to prevent incident recurrence, and to contribute to the safety of consumers.

This document is intended to be beneficial to persons, groups, committees or organizations of all types, such as private, public, and non-profit bodies, regardless of the size of the organization which is investigating consumer incidents.

Purpose

Incident / accident manuals and guidelines describing methods of investigation exist for aircraft, occupational and medical incidents. Even though these fields are different, the commonality is that they do aim to investigate the root cause and contributing factors of the incident, leading to proposals to prevent recurrence, and they do not aim to pursue incident responsibility. The background of the development of the incident survey methods in the fields of aircraft or occupational safety, useful for preventing recurrence more effectively, is that in these areas, investigations were strongly requested or the duties existed. On the other hand, in the case of a consumer incident, especially a serious incident where an investigation is pursued, they would only look for the cause of who was responsible rather than having an individual investigation for preventing recurrence. So far, we cannot confirm the existence of a guideline for that purpose. There are some guidelines in the preceding field which are the common, essential way of thinking. The guideline mentioned here is not a division of expertise in individual fields, but rather focuses on the method to look carefully at the background of the incident using universal causation models and to search for the root cause and contributing factors. Based on such guidelines, it is the purpose of this proposal to create a guideline for incident investigation that contributes to preventing recurrence in consumer incidents.