Most, if not all organisations need to improve their Near Miss Reporting culture, as doing so will not only prevent future accidents but also improve their safety engagement and overall safety culture.
Organisations are consistently looking at ways to improve their safety working practices and procedures to ensure that they have a safe and healthy working environment. For an organisation to improve their safety culture and to implement a successful accident prevention programme, they need to concentrate on their Near Miss Reporting.
Near miss reporting is a critical element of any safety culture. This will provide the information you require statistically, to form a trend analysis of the near miss events across your business, which will ensure that you can implement safety controls to prevent reoccurrence, which in turn will prevent accidents!
Identifying and investigating Near Misses is a key element to finding and controlling risks before employees are injured or property is damaged. It is important that we all understand the following elements of Near Miss Reporting:
- What is a Near Miss?
- Why is Near Miss reporting important?
- What are the benefits of Near Miss reporting?
- How to report a Near Miss?
What is a Near Miss?
A Near Miss is an unplanned event that did not result in an injury, illness or damage – but had the potential to do so. An event, circumstance, condition or behaviour which has the potential to cause injury, illness, accidental release or property/productivity loss – but did not actualise due to chance, corrective action and/or timely intervention.
Why is Near Miss reporting important?
Reporting and investigating accidents or incidents that have occurred is effective and efficient, but reactive. If we report and investigate Near Misses, we can implement an accident/incident prevention strategy that is pro-active rather than reactive.
What are the benefits of Near Miss reporting?
By ignoring Near Misses, we are losing a free lesson in injury prevention. The few minutes spent by reporting a Near Miss event can help prevent a possible serious injury or worse!
In short, reporting Near Misses, learning from them, acting on information/trends should ensure everybody in the business benefits from a safer working environment.
There are several benefits to having a near-miss reporting culture in place, including these:
- It enables us to pro-actively resolve hazards before a tragic or costly event occurs
- It engages the workforce (workers at all levels) in preventing possible future accidents/incidents before they occur
- It increases safety ownership and reinforces workers’ self-esteem
- It exposes valuable information that otherwise might not be discussed
- It develops a positive/proactive and necessary attitude surrounding safety
How to report a Near Miss event
There are many variants to how businesses currently report their Near Miss Events. In my experience if we make our Near Miss Reporting process too complicated or time consuming, events will go unreported!
How can Notify help you?
NOTIFY offers a smart and user-friendly solution. Near Miss Reporting on the Notify Platform can be completed in seconds and submitted for further action and analyses. Get your FREE 14 Day trial or book a demonstration with the team.
