A Study on Improving the Accuracy of Accident Reports Through Event-Based Information Structuring of Accident Occurrence Processes

Industrial accident reporting systems provide the foundation for establishing future prevention strategies by collecting and analyzing accident-related data. While some industrial accidents occur as isolated events, many exhibit a process-oriented nature in which a sequence of temporally connected events accumulates and ultimately leads to a final accident. Nevertheless, a substantial proportion of accident reports are prepared by injured workers or employers who lack specialized safety knowledge. As a result, critical information about the conditions, procedures, and actions involved in accident progression is often insufficiently documented. Such information loss hinders a comprehensive understanding of accident causation and, consequently, reduces the effectiveness of preventive measures. To address this limitation, this study proposes an event-based accident information reporting framework that enables injured workers and employers without professional safety expertise to record accidents in a structured manner following their temporal sequence. The proposed framework defines the observed actions and conditions throughout the accident occurrence process as a series of discrete “events,” each of which is classified by an occurrence type. Furthermore, each occurrence type is linked to a corresponding object that reflects its characteristics, allowing accident components to be described in a standardized and systematic form. The framework is designed to be easily completed through a simple selection-and-entry process centered on occurrence types, thereby facilitating consistent and uniform reporting. When applied to 462 fatal industrial accident cases that occurred in South Korea in 2018, the proposed method indicated that approximately 55% of accidents involved multi-stage event sequences, highlighting the importance of process-related information that is not captured by conventional outcome-centered classification systems. In addition, the distribution of occurrence types differed substantially from patterns observed in existing reporting practices. The structured reporting approach proposed in this study may contribute to the preservation and accumulation of essential information on accident occurrence processes, thereby supporting more effective accident prevention efforts. This study does not propose a new investigation methodologies. Instead, it aims to improve accident reporting quality at the data input stage.