| Workplace Safety - Capture and Act on The Near Miss |
| Tuesday, 26 January 2010 07:19 |
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In my experience, whilst many companies have strong and robust Incident Reporting Systems together with reactive  actions, near misses are not subject to the same intensity. I find that whilst there is strong recognition amongst managers of the importance of near misses, the follow through and impetus is generally lost before it gets to the coal face.  In conversation with workers on site and on the workshop floor, there is always a string of stories about near misses, but when asked if they were reported, there is generally a blank stare. Reporting a near miss ? Well, in theory yes, it should be reported, but in practise ….... Its all to hard, too much trouble, a general feeling that because there wasn't an actual incident, why bother, that managers regard it as time wasting, a fear of paper work, particularly with workers of non english speaking backgrounds and do they really understand the concept in the first place. To quote just a few of the reasons why a near miss quickly vaporises away and doesn't get captured. I believe that there is huge opportunity to reduce actual workplace incidents by ramping up the focus on near misses to the same level as actual incidents. For obvious reasons. But how to make it happen.? Business focus has always been on productivity and in the current environment it is even more acute. Mangers are generally not keen to see workers spending time on non productive activities such as filling in reports or to devote additional resource to investigation and rectification. Certainly Incident Reports and the follow up actions are time consuming and probably additional expense.  I don't have a simple answer, but the bottom line is that incidents are not good for business and proven ways to avoid and eliminate incidents, such as acting on near miss information should be the highest priority. I believe that there is a real opportunity for improvement by applying a critical level of focus to the “near miss”. Both managers and workers at the “coal face” need to be encouraged to develop comprehensive systems which can capture, analyse and thus prevent future incidents occurring. Those near misses need to be recognised as a free, extremely valuable resource in the battle to create an incident free workplace.
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| Last Updated on Tuesday, 26 January 2010 07:48 |
Most people involved with workplace safety are very aware of the iceberg theory.