Why Near Miss Reporting Matters
A
worker steps backwards and almost falls from an unprotected edge.
A forklift reverses from an aisle just as another worker walks past.
A load shifts during lifting but settles before anything falls.
A vehicle rolls slightly after being parked because it was not properly
secured.
Nobody is injured. Nothing is damaged. Work continues.
It can be tempting to regard each of these as a good outcome. In one sense, it is. But from a safety perspective, something important has happened: a hazard or a failure in the way work is being controlled has just shown itself.
The difference between a near miss and an injury can sometimes be little more than timing, position or luck.
That is why near misses are worth reporting.
A near miss gives you information
Near miss reporting should not be about creating paperwork for every minor event at work.
Its value is in identifying situations where something went wrong — or nearly went wrong — and using that information to decide whether something needs to change.
Consider a forklift that emerges from a warehouse aisle at the same time a pedestrian crosses its path. They miss each other by two metres.
It would be easy for both people to carry on with their day. But the useful questions are not about how close they came.
Why could the forklift and pedestrian enter the same space without seeing each other?
Perhaps a storage rack obstructs visibility. Perhaps the pedestrian route is poorly positioned. Perhaps there is no separation between mobile plant and people. Perhaps the traffic management arrangements looked reasonable on paper but do not work particularly well in practice.
The near miss provides an opportunity to find that out before someone gets hit.
Reporting only works if people are willing to report
Workplace Health and Safety Queensland encourages businesses to have a safety reporting process covering matters including near misses, hazards, damaged or faulty equipment and suggestions for improvement.
But having a form or reporting system is only part of it.
Workers need to be comfortable using it.
If reporting a near miss results in an interrogation about who was responsible, workers quickly learn that saying nothing is easier.
The same thing can happen when reports simply disappear into a system and nobody hears anything about them again.
A better response is to treat a near miss as useful information.
What
happened?
What conditions contributed to it?
Do the existing controls actually work?
Has something similar happened before?
Is there a practical change that would reduce the chance of it happening again?
That does not mean ignoring individual behaviour. Sometimes the way a task was performed is relevant. But stopping at "the worker should have been more careful" can mean missing the reason the situation was possible in the first place.
Keep the reporting process simple
For a small business, near miss reporting does not need to become a complicated administrative system.
A
worker needs to know:
- what should be reported;
- who they should tell;
- how to report it; and
- that somebody will actually look at it.
Depending on the workplace, reporting might be through a supervisor, a simple form, an electronic system or another agreed process.
The important part is what happens next.
Someone needs to consider the report, determine whether immediate action is required and make sure any agreed action is followed through.
Where possible, close the loop with the person who raised it.
Even a simple response — "We looked at what you reported yesterday and we're moving that storage rack so drivers can see the pedestrian crossing" — demonstrates that speaking up achieved something.
That makes the next report more likely.
Look for patterns, not just individual events
One near miss can identify a problem.
Several similar near misses can identify a pattern.
Perhaps vehicles regularly reverse into an area used by pedestrians. Perhaps workers repeatedly have difficulty moving the same awkward item. Perhaps guards are frequently being removed to clear a machine. Perhaps the same part of a workshop is continually becoming cluttered.
Individually, those reports may seem minor.
Taken together, they may tell you that an existing control is ineffective or that the way the work is actually being performed is different from the way management thinks it is being performed.
Reviewing near miss reports periodically can therefore be just as useful as responding to each report when it occurs.
Don't wait for an injury to investigate the cause
When someone is seriously injured, businesses quite rightly spend time working out what happened.
Near misses deserve some of that curiosity too.
The investigation does not always need to be formal or lengthy. The response should be proportionate to what occurred and what could reasonably have happened.
Sometimes it may take only a short conversation and an immediate correction.
A more significant event may justify a proper investigation, consultation with workers, review of procedures or risk controls, and documented corrective actions.
The important thing is not to confuse "nobody was hurt" with "nothing went wrong".
Something did happen.
The business simply has the opportunity to deal with it before someone pays the price.
A near miss may still require regulatory notification
There is also an important distinction between an everyday near miss and a legally notifiable incident.
An incident does not necessarily have to cause an injury before notification requirements can apply. Some dangerous incidents involving serious risk can be notifiable even where nobody is injured.
Notification requirements vary between jurisdictions and circumstances, so businesses should check the requirements applying to them and contact their WHS regulator if they are unsure.
Internal near miss reporting should not be treated as a substitute for any regulatory notification that may be required.
The real measure is what happens after the report
A business could record hundreds of near misses and still learn very little from them.
The number of reports is not the objective.
The objective is to identify problems early enough to do something about them.
A useful near miss reporting system creates a simple cycle:
Report it. Understand it. Fix what needs fixing. Tell people what changed.
For a small business, that can be far more valuable than a sophisticated reporting system that nobody wants to use.
When someone says, "That was close", don't just be relieved that nobody was hurt.
Ask why it was close in the first place.