It is not necessarily the case that an accident automatically leads to injury.

From the limited information you have provided, I would suggest that this was such an incidence - an accident that did not lead to injury.

In our pre-defined critieria and internal reporting systems, it would have been a near miss. It is important to pre-define the criteria you use for internal reporting systems, then there is no confusion or argument, as there are various definition to it!

We use:-
Potential Hazard=A hazard is identified.

Near Miss=An “event” has occurred but nobody has been injured and no equipment etc has been damaged.

Incident=An event has occurred and there has been damage to equipment or a spill has gone beyond the point at which material can be recovered.

Accident=An event has occurred and somebody has been hurt.

It really depends on your own definitions.

Investigation and follow-up should always be based on potential rather than actual outcome, which means the classification is not that important.

Suppose it comes down to your own choice.

To me accident is 'any undesirable event'

Near miss is 'any event that could have led to a more serious outcome'.

So a 'no injury' event could be called either?

It's a non injurious event

This problem will rage on for an eternity because there are two very different approaches involved here. HSE have an actual event without injury at the root of their definition - they are looking at an event that has a potential to cause harm. The other side are looking at the potential for an event to occur - it is used thus as a measure of unsafe behaviours or situations that give a potential for harm eg moving a suspended load over a populated work area or leaving a spanner on top of a pipe at high level.

Neither is correct - they measure different things. What is important is that the organisation understands which definition is used. A behaviourist will look towards the second definition more than the first as it measuring to a degree all those buried situations that could catch the unwary or that may at some time be realised in an actual event.

The question is not whether there was an injury but rather why did the person fall and this may well include personal factors such as inattention, rushing from one job to another or physical defects in the walkway. I personally follow the latter but at the end of the day theinvestigation is the key issue not the precise definition.

Bob

That's ROSPA's definition (word perfect - see http://www.rospa.com/faqs/detail.aspx?faq=255).

I don't like it as a definition - it means getting mugged while walking along the street is an accident. They apparently really mean that - see for example http://www.rospa.com/res.../rospa-safety-guide.pdf: "This is quite broad and it can include, for example, intentional injury where this was not foreseen by the injured party (for example, an assault in the course of a robbery)."

ROSPA might like violent crime to be included within their empire, but I don't think it should be an accident. That definition is too broad.

Thanks everyone

For example:

Person up a ladder falls off - hurts themselves - Accident

Ladder blows over in the wind and hits a window breaking the glass - Incident

Ladder blows over in the wind and lands on the ground - Near Miss.

I would investigate any of the above scenarios.

In examples 2 and 3 is the person still on the floor from example 1?

Was there any damage to the roof? If not, and considering there was not personal injury, IMO this would be a near miss and I would report it as such. I would still investigate it and the level of investigation would be in line with the potential of harm. In this case very high.

Incident= accidents & near misses (as far as I know)