Posted By mark foster
Despite applying all the usual pressures I have been unable to generate a culture of reporting incidents from our team of site based installation engineers. As a result I have been coerced by our H&S comittee into implementing a new system where each engineer has to submit at least one report a month. I have suceedded in softening this requirement to one near miss / accident report or safety observation.

This has promoted some debate as to what constitutes a near miss, I would welcome any input the forum has!

Posted By Steve B
Or to put it in simple terms:

Near Miss
An event or condition which if not rectified or left unattended may result in personal injury, damage to plant or other loss.



Regards
Steve

Posted By mark foster
Thanks Ted I fully take your point but the problem is that if as a manager supervisor you do not witness the near miss yourself it is difficult say what is not being reported. The staff in question are roaming teams of service and installation engineers working away fom the organisations offices so it is difficult to be constantly looking over their shoulder.

The actual requirement is AT LEAST one a month, currently I'm getting none so I feel this is a realistic minimum. The concern is if we insisted on a higher number people might just make them up!

The process of education and training will have to continue and its the definitions of near misses that I want to effectively convey. We already have two very different definitions as responses

Posted By Ian G Hutchings
Hi Mark

I think the problem may be in front of you, in your question. 'I have been unable to generate the near miss reporting culture'. Presuming that you are the health and safety adviser/manager, here lies the problem. You will struggle to be able to do this.

The only people that can generate the culture are the directors, managers and front line staff/supervision. If you try and drive this alone it is likely to fall down, unless you have an unusually conscientious group of people.

You probably need to take a longer and more educative approach, rather than a directive one. People need to have a genuine value for why they should report a near miss and really want to do it. This needs to then be supported by thorough investigation, led by the manager not you.

I am concerned about the targets. I have come across this in the past and it, in my opinion, is not effective in the long run. People will then be doing it for the wrong reasons.

I am happy to have a chat next week or via email link if you want some more thoughts and what I have done previously to make this work.


All the best

Ian

Posted By Pete48
Ah, the near miss. I remember her well. She sat alongside me in everything I did, always near and yet so far away. Move towards her and she moves away, move away from her and she gets annoyed and causes an accident.

The biggest issue with near miss reporting is "what happens next" or "can anything actually be done about the circumstances or events". If you can solve that part, then you will get better reporting of what most of us would call "near miss".

I doubt you will ever get individuals to report any event in which they feel they, or their workmates are the main contributing factor. (e.g tripped on the step or over my hammer which I had left laying there)
The only time I ever had any lasting success with the principle of reporting non-injury incidents was when we classed them as safety defects. Just report anything that is not as it should be or where you had difficulty in following the SSOW.

Posted By Chris Jerman
I think that we're all missing the important step here. When we talk about accidents, what we really mean is injuries. That's the difference between a near miss and an accident, if I read your definitions correctly. People are quite used to reporting accidents, because we put them in the accident book - ie we record the injury and treatment but little about the event because that's seen as investigation and we don't teach 1st aiders much about taking details concerning the event.

So which is more important. An EVENT that resulted in a minor injury or a near miss that could have resulted in a fracture? Answer - well that's not enough information. The key here is to use a forecast of the reasonable limits of predictable injury as we do in risk assessment. (remember incident investigation is only risk assessment in reverse; what are you doing what could go wrong? - what were you doing what did go wrong?) Apart from traditionally, we only state the ACTUAL injury in investigation not the reasonable worst.

For true synergy between the reactive and pro-active we must get away from 'injury' completely and focus on the event itself. How many times do we hear "That was an accident waiting to happen" or "If I had a pound for every time that had happened"? How come someone has to be injured before it gets attention? Well, because historically, we ask people to report injuries not events.

Ditch 'accident' and near-miss and go for 'incident' or 'event' reporting. It's tough to get going, but believe me it's the right way.

Action, effort and priority should be driven by POTENTIAL, not forgetting likelihood of recurrence of course. So, if an event results in minor injury (actual) and reasonable worst injury (virtual) would never be more than minor - go and look at something more important like an event with actual of zero but virtual of major. To use anything else as a basis for driving the system is totally reactive.

See the point?

C

Posted By Robert.
Why not re-name as near loss reporting as an means to prevention or control as this could cover environmental, safety, quality, rework, financial.