A warehouse worker is walking down an aisle. Tall racking on either side obscures their visibility of oncoming traffic at the end of the aisle. The worker steps out from the aisle end, not noticing an oncoming forklift, but manages to jump back out of the way before a collision occurs.
Why is it important to report a near miss? Encourage employee participation in health and safety matters. This is essential in creating a successful safety management system. Motivate employees to contribute to their safety and the safety of others in a responsible manner. Ensure you have enough data to measure performance.
This will allow you to measure the success of your current control measures, as well as identify trends and faults within the system and introduce more effective controls. Help to prevent similar incidents from occurring. How to report a near miss. Where the incident occurred. What work activities were being carried out.
The type of incident. Details of what happened. Dangerous occurrences. A near miss has been reported — what happens now? Questions to ask include:. What was the problem?
Why did it happen? What can be done to prevent similar incident occurring in future? Top tips for an effective near-miss reporting procedure.
Lead by example. Encourage participation. Take time to train. Share success stories. Increase worker engagement by making the process simple. Consider allowing anonymous reporting in a bid to encourage employees to submit near-miss reports and ensure accurate and reliable data. Look into using incentives that encourage reporting. Ellis Whittam: One of your legally-required competent persons. Anyone of which could have caused a serious injury.
Good Catch vs. HSE Observation 2. Incentivising HSE observations 3. Training employees to understand the categories of reporting 4. Training your HSE department in data 5. Develop systems to capture and analyse the data 6. Linking HSE Observations to employee performances.
I would like to start by highlighting the overall importance of near-miss reporting. It is essential to strong safety culture and can provide companies with great insights into potential problem areas within their business. A near-miss is defined as an incident that could have resulted in injury, illness, or property damage, but for some reason or other, it did not. Often attributed to just a matter of timing or just…pure luck. When it comes to the applying these definitions to practical situations, however, safety professionals themselves often debate the grey areas.
Many of these questions are often asked as companies do not always get into the correct amount of detail when it comes to defining incident categories. Providing an incentive or having a general quota for near-miss reporting is a practice some organizations undertake. Although well-intentioned and to an extent can create somewhat of a good reporting culture , the end results very often fall short of expectations.
Executives and HSE personnel where such programs are implemented will be very familiar with some of the below common issues:. The bad news is that such problems are likely to be a lot bigger then what most people in a company perceive when it comes to incentivized near-miss reports. To get the best data to help illuminate future accidents, understanding the difference between incidents, near misses, unsafe conditions Good Catch and unsafe acts behaviors is vital.
The following illustration very well puts the different definitions into context:. To improve this process, you may want to consider some of the below practical measures that are likely to enhance near miss reporting within your organization :. Perhaps you may want to consider a more proactive mechanism in which employees can report unsafe conditions, acts as well as near misses in one place. By focusing on HSE Observations you could very well reduce the number of near misses.
From experience, the majority of the findings are likely to be unsafe conditions, followed by unsafe acts and then the avoiding of a near miss because of the observation. Collecting near-miss reports helps create a culture that seeks to identify and control hazards, which will reduce risks and the potential for harm, OSHA states. But a well-run program goes beyond the collection of reports.
Crowl agreed. At Fluor, near misses are ranked by potential severity. If it could have resulted in an injury or death, a full investigation is conducted. If the near miss creates a condition that is less serious — such as a trip hazard due to an electric cord — the hazard is abated and the risk is communicated to everyone.
At PIKA, lessons learned from near misses are shared with employees through various platforms, including at company meetings and individual project sites. Sometimes, the near misses are communicated by the president and CEO. To prevent this from happening again, workers were advised to properly extinguish cigarettes in the sand provided in the containers, and keep combustibles and other debris out of the containers.
Additionally, the company updated the design of the containers. Employee participation in any near-miss program is vital, Ruebesam said. Workers should be trained on how to properly identify and recognize potential hazards. To help make it easy for employees to submit near misses and ensure good data, consider allowing them to turn in near-miss reports anonymously, Ruebesam suggested.
Similarly, avoid naming people who may have contributed to the near miss. At PIKA, individuals involved in near misses are not openly identified. To get employees in the habit of turning in near-miss data, employers may be tempted to set quotas.
But Ruebesam advises against this.
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