How about incentivising the reporting; one 'raffle' ticket per report? Monthly draw for a cash prize. Could you make it easier to report? How about an online form or even an app for the phone? You could allow reporting by text message. Or, to make it really adventurous, give a prize for the most innovation or obscure reporting method (carrier pidgeon, paper plane, tied to a brick and thrown through the H&S office window....)

We designed a card to input near miss, unsafe act, dangerous situation and the proposed corrective measure(s) and sent to h&s to avoid conflict between employee and superior. The situation was discussed with the concerned Line Manager / superior without naming the employee for prompt analysis / action in certain case. A committee met every two weeks to award points. The first year we addressed lots of non conformance but during prize ceremony, the three winners were qualified with all sort of nicknames....even from losers. Don’t forget that if you have peanuts to give you will get only monkeys...

Eddy Your statement: 'We are looking to introduce near miss/dangerous occurrence reporting into the company. We tried last year, however it wasnt a sucess. We set out the forms, however nobody wanted to be bothered to fill them in. We have since had some health and safety raining carried out in order to improve the culture. Can anyone give me some advice on how to make this a sucess i.e. letters to employees.' suggests several indications of conflicting messages to employees and managers. Positively the reference 'improve the culture'; less so, the references to 'couldn't be bothered to fill the (forms) in' and 'letters to employees'. Enormous volumes of research indicate that more than random incentives are needed to 'change the culture' to one of consistently safe performance. Unless the performance of all managers at every level is assessed on a basis that includes the quality of safety for which they are personally responsible, there's no reliabile statistical basis for predicting any consistent level of near misses/hits or of reporting. While Lojikglos is right to refer to a behavioural change initiative, you're more likely to grasp the essentials from either research reports in the Journal of Safety Science or explanatory guides to behavioural safety by Dom Cooper, CFIOSH, C Psychol or by E Scott Geller. They set out the evidence about the mechanisms of thinking, observation and conversational feedback associated with stable levels of comparatively low safety incidents, high quality and of qualities of self-esteem, empowerment and inclusion higher than in railways.

Im suprised that there seems to be many who have just introduced near miss reporting systems. The rail industry introduced them many years ago, perhaps as far back as fifteen years. The Rail industry operate a process called CIRAS. which works very well. It is a result of an inquiry that recomended a system for confidential reporting of all safety concerns, it of course has a filter to ensure any urgent reports are acted upon very quickly, and works very well. All that is required is a means of reporting that someone has a worry about how things are done, there is no wonderful means of doing that, it needs a simple process of saying I'm worried about a certain aspect of the process because I think it is unsafe. Tell the foreman or submit a written report is maters not, a process to raise a concern is all that is needed. As I say it concerns me that some companies are only just establishing a process to report such worries????

Don't call it "near miss" - that has a whole connotation of admitting or blagging that the employee or someone else got it wrong. Don't use the term "Dangerous Occurrence" - a prescribed RIDDOR term, you want to avoid confusion there. Throw out the negative connotation and accentuate the positives. Call it a suggestion scheme. Various incentives and random prizes. Don't limit it to "health and safety". Look at other efficiencies, waste management, environmental compliance etc. Get employees involved from the start, go armed with some initial suggestions or particular areas of concern and ask them what sort of incentives they's like to see. An extra day off for a top prize maybe?