disrupting the work process and resulting in or having the potential to cause injury, occupational disease, or death (Jovanovic, Arandelovic & Jovanovic, 2004). Accident causation is commonly divided into categories, such as unsafe practices or procedures, unsafe situational factors, and unsafe environmental factors. Multiple factors and risks—for example, hazardous exposures, workplace and process design, work organization and environment, economics, and other social factors—contribute to traumatic injuries. All accidents are potentially preventable. If an accident happened once, it will most likely happen again unless steps are taken to alter at least one of the factors contributing to the accident (Haney, 2003). Occupational accident investigations are conducted for many reasons, including the prevention of future similar accidents, regulatory compliance, and quality improvement. The results of investigations must be detailed enough to allow agencies mandated to address work-related injuries and deaths to analyze the information, understand the circumstances leading to the accident, and take the necessary remedial steps to prevent a recurrence in the future (ILO, 2002). The considerations in occupational accident investigations are quite different from those in most death Author Affiliation: WorkSafeBC, Royal Columbian Hospital, Forensic Science Technology, British Columbia Institute of Technology. The author declares no conflict of interest. Correspondence: Colin Harris, MSN, BSc(Crim), RN, F-ABMDI, Fatal and Serious Injury Investigations, WorkSafeBC, P.O. Box 5350 Stn. Terminal, Vancouver, BC V6B 5L5. E-mail: colin.harris@worksafebc.com. Received April 7, 2013; accepted for publication May 31, 2013. Copyright © 2013 International Association of Forensic Nurses DOI: 10.1097/JFN.0b013e31829e8f1d Original Article 2.1 ANCC Contact Hours Journal of Forensic Nursing www.journalforensicnursing.com 193 Copyright © 2013 International Association of Forensic Nurses. Unauthorized reproduction of this article is prohibited. investigations, criminal investigations, or the triage of injuries for treatment. The coroner or medical examiner is primarily concerned with the cause of death related to any trauma, the law enforcement is concerned with identifying any criminal intent, and the medical practitioner is concerned with the treatment required for that trauma. The occupational accident investigator is concerned not only with the cause of the accident but also with the mechanism of injury. The biomechanics of the injury may help to determine the position of the worker, what the worker may have been doing at the time of the incident, what type of equipment the worker might have been using, and the work process itself. Neither the coroner or medical examiner nor the police are particularly interested in any of these factors in isolation. However, to the occupational accident investigator, this type of information may help to identify violations of occupational health and safety regulations, leading to the prevention of future injuries. Little research has been done on workplace incident investigation. A search of common medical and academic search engines returned numerous articles referencing both the forensic assessment of injuries related to death investigations in general and the investigation of motor vehicle crash dynamics, but little is related to traumatic occupational injuries. All articles retrieved on searches related to injury in the occupational setting involved musculoskeletal injuries, such as sprains and strains. No literature was available on the forensic evaluation of traumatic injuries sustained in occupational injuries or fatalities. Clearly, the forensic evaluation of traumatic occupational injuries is lacking; at the very least, the application of this expertise is not being shared in applicable journals or discussed in academic literature. Using workplace accident investigation in British Columbia, Canada, as an example, this article examines how forensic nursing science may be applied to the investigation of work-related injuries and fatalities, ultimately improving the outcomes of those investigations. Forensic Evaluation of Traumatic Injuries in Occupational Accident Investigations Forensic means pertaining to law (Venes, 2010) and refers to the application of a broad spectrum of scientific methods and techniques to establish facts in association with legal issues. Forensic sciences include a wide variety of disciplines under which the facts regarding an event or artifact are deemed to be accurate to prove or disprove difficult legal arguments and determine the truth. In the context of healthcare, forensics focuses on those areas in which medicine and human behavior have an interface with the law (Hammer, Moynihan & Pagliaro, 2013). Forensic medicine interprets or establishes facts in relation to civil or criminal law. The most well-known application of forensics in medicine is forensic pathology, which is solely concerned with the investigation of death. However, not all victims of trauma, assault, or other injuries with legal implications sustain fatal injuries. Clinical forensic medicine (Lynch, 2011a) is the application of forensic practices previously reserved for the pathologist at autopsy to living patients in a clinical setting. Living forensic patients include survivors of traumatic injuries. Forensic medical