I am working on paper for one of my college classes and a question comes to mind:

Is there a formal requirement to do a investigation/report for close calls and minor mishaps which do not result in any significant injury (i.e. a FF closes a compartment door on his finger and requires ice for 20 minutes but does not sustain any real injury)? OSHA has certain requirements, sure, but even when nobody is injured (i.e. a FF drops an ax from the bucket and it hits the ground harmlessly. I would consider this a Close Call, as much as if a Firefighter fell of a roof, or into a basement and was unharmed.) there's something for everyone to learn from the incident.

If so, who in the department is responsible for conducting the investigation and what is the requirement for documenting the incident?

Hand-in-hand with the first question is how many departments have a requirement to conduct an "after action review," or AAR, after every call. Even routine calls for a paid department have lessons to be learned, or is it left to the Officer on each crew to decide if they want to do an AAR for a particular run.

How many crews/departments just Return to Quarters, clean up and go back to whatever they were doing before? When do calls become "routine" for your department? and would doing an AAR after each run help prevent the "just a routine call" trap?

A sample AAR would be the Officer asking, "Did we respond to this call safely, and within our SOPs and standards? What could we have done to make it safer, or how could we have dealt with _________ better? Did anyone have any issues I don't know about on this run? (could be anything: straps on someone's SCBA got moved and they couldn't don it until they arrived on scene, or the latch on a compartment seemed a little sticky, etc.).

I know the Incident Safety Officer is the one responsible for overseeing Safety during an incident, and "everyone is a Safety Officer" means we're all responsible for doing our part safely and watching out for others doing their parts safely, but how does this relate the Occupational Safety side of things? How many departments have a Chief Officer as their Department Safety Officer with both Incident and Occupational Safety responsibilities, and how many divide the two disciplines between two separate people/divisions?

Thanks in advance for your thoughts and answers.

Greenman