The wet corridor that kept happening
At a 90-bedroom hotel, a housekeeper slips on a tiled corridor at 06:40 and sprains her wrist. She is off work for three days. The duty manager writes 'employee carelessness - footwear' on the incident form and sends a two-line email asking heads of department to remind staff to wear the correct shoes. Nobody visits the corridor. In the preceding five weeks there were two near-misses at the same spot, one passed on verbally to the maintenance supervisor, and a guest complained about a wet floor. The buffing machine's water tank has been leaking and is booked for repair 'when the part arrives'. The hotel employs 120 staff and has three recorded accidents in the last year.
1. Should this be investigated, and at what depth? Justify the proportion.
Read the worked answer
Yes, it should be investigated - and the depth should be modest for the injury but serious for the signal.
On the injury alone this is a three-day lost-time sprain, recorded but not reportable as an over-7-day injury; a full formal team would be disproportionate. But the surrounding facts change the calculation:
- The same location has produced two near-misses and a guest complaint in five weeks, so the frequency is high even though each event was small.
- The potential severity is much higher than the actual outcome. A fall onto tile can be a fracture or a head injury; we got a sprain by luck.
- A leaking machine is still in use, so the exposure is continuing while the report is being written.
- Near-misses were not captured - one was verbal only - which means the organisation's warning system partly failed.
So: a structured investigation of about an hour at the scene, plus interviews and record checks, run by the duty manager with the maintenance supervisor, rather than a formal panel. The proportionate response scales to the potential, not just the bandage.
And the 'carelessness' entry has to go. It is a conclusion written before any evidence was gathered, and it closes the investigation at the point where it should open.
2. What evidence would you gather in the first 48 hours, and from whom?
Read the worked answer
The scene, before it is cleaned and forgotten: the corridor at 06:40 light levels, floor type, slope and drainage, where the water was and how far it spread, whether there were cones, barriers or a wet-floor sign, and the buffing machine itself - photograph it and record its condition before it is taken away for repair.
Records: the machine's maintenance log and the date the part was ordered; the cleaning schedule and method for that corridor; the accident book; any near-miss log and the guest complaint log; whether the two earlier near-misses appear anywhere in writing.
People, spoken to separately and without blame framing: the injured housekeeper (what she saw, whether the floor was signed, how long it had been wet, her footwear and whether it is the issue or a convenient label), the two staff who had near-misses, the maintenance supervisor, the duty manager, and the guest who complained.
Two practical rules. Explain that the purpose is to fix the problem, not to find a culprit, or people will tell you what they think you want. And get the machine's condition recorded before the part arrives and the evidence disappears with it.
The most important finding may be procedural rather than physical: if two near-misses existed only in conversation, the reporting route is the underlying cause.
3. What should the investigation output look like, and what would convince you the corrective actions are working?
Read the worked answer
The output is a short report, not a form: what happened, in sequence; immediate causes (water on a tiled route with no barrier, a leaking machine still in use); underlying causes (a defect with no interim control while awaiting a part, no defined wet-cleaning method for that corridor, near-misses not captured, no routine supervisor check of high-traffic routes at shift start).
Actions with named owners and dates, split into interim and permanent:
- Interim: barrier or re-route the corridor, change the mopping/hand-dry method, chase and escalate the part, check the machine before each use.
- Permanent: repair and a pre-use check regime, a written wet-cleaning method with signage and barriers as standard, a near-miss route housekeeping staff actually trust, and the findings shared across all three shifts.
The measures that would convince me:
- Near-miss reports from housekeeping rise and are closed with feedback to the reporter - silence after an event like this is a bad sign, not a good one.
- Pre-use machine checks are recorded daily and can be produced on request.
- No recurrence at that location over the next quarter.
- Staff can describe, unprompted, what they do when a floor is wet and how to report a defect.
Review at three months. Do not declare success on 'no more accidents' alone; with 120 staff and three accidents a year, that number could mean control or it could mean nobody is telling you.