Posted By Chris Abbott Perhaps "near hit" would be a better term? or "near incident/accident" Chris

Posted By Peter MacDonald I prefer "unsafe condition" or "unsafe act". i.e. hammer kicked off scaffold and landing on ground would be both. Unsafe act.....kicking/dropping/loss of control of hammer Unsafe condition.....no toeboard, hammer left unattended (housekeeping)etc. Peter

Posted By Stuart Nagle the other, or fourth view, is presumptive, it is going to happen!

Posted By Chris Abbott Sounds a bit too much like "hair splitting" to me. My view is that the differences between an accident and a near miss is simply luck. Therefore to my mind, a near miss (or nearly hit) is investigated in the same way and accident is. :)

Posted By Raymond Rapp Jim, I have never been comfortable with the phrase 'near miss' and once described it as an idiom, which I believe means peculiar to the language. A near miss indicates to some that nothing happened when obviously something did ocurr. Therefore near misses are often not taken seriously, indeed due to the large amount of potential accidents important data can be lost. It may be a case of semantics as some have already suggested but I would prefer the term 'incident' as opposed to near miss. On a broader concept there should be a standardisation of terms in accident and incident analysis because I find many terms confusing e.g. underlying causes, root/primary cause, secondary causes, slips, lapses etc. Perhaps I may take up the subject for a future MPhil/PhD ! Regards Ray

Posted By Sally Jim I agree totally with you, it irritates me as an expression. By definition if something nearly missed you it in fact hit you. That said it is a well know expression that everyone understands and having spent the first couple of years of my safety career trying to persuade others to share my opinion I've learnt to live with it :-)

Posted By John Webster For the pedants: At first sight, "near miss" does seem to be a contradiction in terms, even though it's deeply ingrained in the language. Its origin is probably American. Merriam-Webster's Dictionary of English Usage (1994), tracing the phrase to World War II, notes its ubiquity and concludes that "despite its apparent lack of logic, it is not an error." It would have referred to a bullet, shell or bomb that missed the observer, but was near enough to be of concern. Fowler's Modern English Usage defines a near miss simply as "a miss that was nearly a hit." (That's from the 1968 edition; the 1996 Fowler's omits the phrase, which suggests that it's no longer deemed worthy of discussion.)

Posted By john o'meara Jim, But what matters here? Whether the term is used correctly according to a precise, dictionary-defined meaning? Or is the meaning in the minds of people who use it more important? People do know what they mean when they use "near miss" - they think "gee, that nearly took my head off!" But something puzzles me when these topics arise (the use of "accident" also crops up from time to time). OHS is very much an evidence based, research orientated discipline, yes? So, when it comes to terminolgy in the public arena, shouldn't we research what these terms mean to people before attempting any changes? Maybe it's safety professionals, academics and dictionary compilers that need to make the shift. J.

Posted By Alec Wood I agree in part with the statement above "plain English is no good if it leads to miss-information - on a large scale", but not in this specific case I would argue. The English language is constantly evolving and common useage is most often regarded as adequate justification for the existance of a phrase or word. Surely the fact that everyone knows what it is is sufficient reason to continue its use, at least when communicating with people outside our field. Potential loss, event, and all the others are fine ideas, but you will have to explain what you mean by it in the very next sentence so why bother. Also, such alternatives would be open to misinterpretation which could, in turn, lead to inappropriate decisions/actions being taken. Talking of mis-information and mis-understanding when did violence become reclassified as "challenging behaviour", a description which would tend to conjour up the image of argumentativeness, stubborness or one of my teenage son's other delightfull traits. I understand that in this specific circumstance there is probably the expression of frustration rather than any real attempt to harm, but the distortion of the reader's understanding of the event is deliberate and indefensible.