Hi Sinead,

Completely agree with you. Had the pallet fallen over and narrowly missed someone, I would class that as a near miss. Our classification of a near miss is;

"an undiserable event that DID NOT lead to injury or damage but could easily of done so under different circumstances"

So in the is example, the pallet on it's edge is not an undiserable event but an undesirable situation. the event would be the pallet falling.

Just had a look back on the reports & for one month alone there were 82no. near misses reported!!!

Look to the positives though, the employees are readily embracing a reporting culture. All that's needed is a little redirection.

I struggle to get our guys to put near misses in, even on some quite serious incidents (which I only find out about by reading back through the logs).

Alan

I can see this thread running until the New Year!

Without wishing to get into the world of semantics a near miss is an unsafe condition or act, which by definition had the potential to cause and accident or incident. So, poor housekeeping could be a near miss if the condition caused a risk - it usually does. A broken piece of pallet could be a tripping/slipping hazard, regardless it should be tidied up - job done.

Personally, I would not classify general housekeeping issues as a near miss per se because they are normally low risk and there is a danger of demoting the concept of near misses, which tend to be a higher risk.

Near Miss? Observation? Positive Intervention - all before an Incident

Our company uses the term for Near Miss 'where significant harm to person or damage to property may have occurred' and encourages the reporting of observations like many other companies by use of a 'reporting card'

As per some of the posts above the 'varied use' of this term can frighten people in the industry - we may report 500Observations in a week that other companies may term 'near miss'

Similar to previous comments - keep focussed on the intention and not necessarily the title

Sinead,

I am in the same camp as your predecessor. I encourage our staff to report near misses including, as you describe, what amounts to housekeeping. The reason for this is that I want them to get into the habit of reporting all issues so that the 'real' near miss is not missed. We also require all investigators of near miss to provide feedback to the reporter so that this will continue to encourage further reporting. We have been doing this for nearly 3 years now and annual near miss reporting has reason from around 75 to over 500 and over 100 different people report near misses each year (our staffing level is around 225). What is more important is that our RIDDOR accidents have decreased significantly and recently we went 18 months without one. Minor accidents still occur but we are working on that. Our ratios, compared to the Birds triangle, are going in the right direction. Also, as Ron says, we encourage people to deal with it at the time so we do get a number of near miss forms coming in with all actions completed.

So in summary I would like to say let them continue to report whatever they perceive as a near miss. If you need to remove certain ones for reporting purposes then so be it.

I recognise the examples as unsafe conditions. As such they have a potential and need some governance but they are not near misses.

As some one said, earlier in the thread, if the pallet had fallen and narrowly missed someone then that is the near miss which has that unsafe condition as one of the causes.

I think it is important to recognise the difference and re-inforce this with employees if the true benefit of using the near miss definition is to be gained.

The importance of taking action has already been identified. If the event is an unsafe condition then why complicate matters by requiring a near miss report? In a good culture the matter would be sorted there and then, maybe even put on an inspection register or shift log. Routine inspections establish status and trends much better.
On the other hand if the near miss occurs then it is reasonable to expect a formal report and follow up. We taught people to recognise that moment when they were thinking "crikey that was close, Bob could have been flattened if he had been walking past when that pallet fell". There is your near miss!


p48

Pete

Not sure that is the article but looks a good read anyway - thanks.

Graham

So interesting in fact I had to pinch myself to keep awake - LOL!

goto

Thanks, that's the one I believe.

I still think it is a good idea to keep an open mind. Consider how much resource is put into near miss reporting/data collection and what actual benefits it brings? I know non-events are impossible to record, indeed that is part of the problem, the world is obsessed with KPIs, none more so than in safety via lagging indicators.

Ray