Im wondering you someone could shed some light on the above

A colleague and I are having a debate about this, he thinks that the above 2 categories have different definitions whereas I think they are the same

Cheers
Carolyn

You are both right and both wrong!!!!:-)

The definition of near misses !!!! Is very much attached to particular organisations and there are many nuances of meaning around. Many have tried a definition but there is no universally accepted answer to what a near miss really is.

Mine is personally far stronger than either of you in that it is some unplanned unexpected change in a workplace or procedure or some event that occurs out of the ordinary run of expected events and that does not actually give injury but rather raises the level of risk of actual injury or damage to people or of damage to property or the environment.

As long as you have an explicit description of what you mean internally in your organisation, it should not matter!

We use the follwing explicit descriptions:-

Potential Hazard: A hazard (significant!) is identified.

Near- Miss: An event without loss or injury i.e. an "event" has occurred, but nobody has been injured and no equipment has been damaged.

Incident: An event with a loss, but no injury i.e. an event has occurred and there has been damage to equipment or a spill has gone beyond the point at which the material can be recovered.

Injury Accident: An event with injury i.e. someone has been hurt.

I agree with jay. I tend to define it this way:

Accident - Something has happened which has resulted in someone being injured.

Incident - Something has happened which has resulted in damage but no injury

Near Miss - Something has happened which could of resulted in an injury or damage

'That truck nearly hit me' - Near Miss
'I caught them working of a 8 meter scaffold tower with no hand rails' could also be described as Near Miss!

Personally, I dislike the term 'near-miss'. If you 'nearly miss' something, you have hit it (think about it)! The use of the term 'near-miss' has always caused confusion among many safety professionals, managers and the workforce. The simplest way of getting to the original intent and meaning is to use the term 'Close Call'. This is something everyone understands.

Nice!

It is near miss. A miss that was near. Two planes too close, no collision but investigated because they should not have so close together.

Hi achrn. I was almost convinced by your logic until I looked in the Concise Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology, where "Near" (adv) is defined as almost, nearly! On this basis, near is synonymous with nearly. Therefore my opinion was consistent with this definition.

I then looked in the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary itself. There are a lot of different definitions depending on the context. I did find " Denoting approximation in degree or amount', (which is accordance with your point 'a miss that was near') defined as "within a (very) little, almost (Now usually expressed by Nearly!). Again indicating near is synonymous with nearly.

In Roget's Thesaurus, Nearly means practically, almost, all but, more or less, near enough, roughly around, in the region of, about, approximately, thereabouts, as good as, within an ace of. The latter is about as close to the intent of the term near-miss as you can get: within an ace of being hurt, etc.

Interestingly, the term near-miss is not in either of the Oxford English texts. In Rogets Thesaurus 'Close call' comes under escape, avoidance, i.e. narrow escape, hairbreadth, close shave, close call, narrow squeak, near thing. Again no 'near-miss". or its opposite 'Near-hit'.

So, now we have explored the English Language a little, this series of posts has made my point. The term 'near-miss' means different things to different people and causes confusion. There are better terms such as 'Close-Call, or even better 'Potential Incident'.

Thanks for the fun.

Etymology is not meaning.

Your interpretation requires one to ignore the straightforward meaning - that a near miss is a miss which was near (much like a red balloon is a balloon that is red) in favour of assuming a declining (archaic) usage of the 'near' and an implied 'a' and thereby concluding that something called a miss is actually a hit.

As I said, if the phrase everyone used was 'nearly a miss' you might have a point.

But it isn't.

Why not just use 'close call'; everyone knows what that means.