may have further limitations in the context of prevention of workplace fatalities. There may be a lack of knowledge of injury prevention; a lack of time, expertise, and the resources required to examine potential implications for similar workplace incidents; and an inability to evaluate contributory factors, system failures, and effective countermeasures. As a result, injury determinants will not be systematically identified from the investigation (Bugeja, Ibrahim, & Brodie, 2010). To summarize, when a worker is fatally injured in an occupational accident, the coroner may not attend the scene if the worker dies in a hospital, and important evidence from the scene can be lost. If the cause of death is fairly obvious, no autopsy may be performed, and therefore, no forensic evaluation at all may occur. If an autopsy is performed, it may be conducted by a pathologist, who is not forensically trained and will focus on the cause of death to meet the coroner’s mandate, rather than forensically evaluating all the injuries. As a result, in many cases, occupational accident investigators often do not receive the information they need about the accident scene, the injuries, or the relationship between the injuries and what the worker was doing at the time of the accident. Therefore, it is important that an investigator with forensic expertise (i.e. forensic nursing) be involved in the investigation from scene attendance/consultation to the forensic evaluation of traumatic injuries. WorkSafeBC’s FSI Investigation section historically has not availed itself of in-house medical or forensic medical expertise in the investigation of occupational accidents, despite the inclusion of many other subject-matter experts, including engineers, human factor specialists, industry-specific specialists, legal experts, and others. Up to this point, no one with any medical or forensic medical education or experience (e.g. a forensic nurse) has been included either as a resource or as part of the investigations team. Virtually, every conceivable angle related to the investigation of an occupational accident by the FSI section is covered by individuals such as engineers, legal services, human factors specialists, and others providing subject-matter expertise—except from within the field of medicine or forensic medicine. Clearly, if occupational accident investigations are to succeed in determining corrective actions for the employer and preventing the occurrence of similar events in the future, two changes are needed. The first is for fatal and serious injury investigations to stand alone. Investigations officers should not assume that other individuals or agencies will collect evidence that will assist their investigations but may not be needed to meet that agency’s own mandate. The second is to have an occupational accident investigator with forensic nursing expertise evaluate the scene and the injuries, attend the autopsy, and share information with the forensic pathologist. The application of forensic nursing science would be especially valuable when a forensic pathologist is not involved and when autopsies are not completed. It should be noted that WorkSafeBC investigations’ officers also investigated 237 serious injuries and potential for serious injury cases of traumatic occupational accidents between 2008 and 2012 (WorkSafeBC, 2013). Because these were nonfatalities, eliminating coroner or forensic pathologist involvement on an average of 47 cases per year during this period did not have the benefit of any kind on the forensic evaluation of injuries assessment. In these cases, the application of forensic nursing science could have assisted in determining the mechanism of injury and reconstructing the incident events, thereby raising the quality of investigative outcomes. Implications for Clinical Forensic Nursing Practice Although the forensic evaluation of wounds and injuries is commonplace in the death investigation field, the use of these techniques in the context of both fatalities and survivors of trauma in workplace accidents is a relatively new application of clinical forensic medicine. Dr. Patrick Bessant-Matthews, a former forensic pathologist with the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology and a former Deputy Chief Medical Examiner for Dallas, Texas, believes a successful outcome in an occupational accident investigation must include a thorough understanding of the multiple characteristics of blunt and sharp force injuries or wounds to predict the type of mechanical force that might have caused them (personal communication, October 25, 2012). Dr. Besant-Matthews believes that, although this is relatively new territory, circumstantial, positional, and directional information about wounds and injuries is highly relevant and quite often essential in determining causation in cases of Original Article Journal of Forensic Nursing www.journalforensicnursing.com 197 Copyright © 2013 International Association of Forensic Nurses. Unauthorized reproduction of this article is prohibited. both serious injury and fatalities (Dr. Besant-Matthews, personal communication, October 25, 2012). The forensic evaluation of wounds and injuries in the occupational accident setting can determine the mechanism of injury, facilitate event analysis and reconstruction, assist in the evidentiary requirements pertaining to legal proceedings, identify violations of occupational health and safety regulations, and