Special Topics in Safety Management

Near-Miss Reporting: You Can’t Fix What You Don’t Know About

If you don’t investigate today’s near-miss incident, you’re not going to prevent tomorrow’s accident. And, because you can’t examine what you don’t know about, make sure you can rely on employees to report all incidents.

Near-miss incidents (or “close calls,” as they’re also often dubbed) are leading indicators of safety performance. A “leading indicator” is a measurable factor or statistic that may indicate future value or direction of another variable, such as workplace accidents.

A “lagging indicator,” on the other hand, is a measurable factor or statistic that indicates facts about past events. A workplace injury and illness log or a lost workday report are lagging indicators. The trouble with lagging indicators is that they don’t really tell you the root causes or catalysts for accidents and near misses.


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Blame-Free Environment

Near-miss incidents are invaluable tools for identifying patterns of undesirable events that could lead to accidents. But, in order to examine near misses and find solutions to safety problems, you have to know about the hazards that cause these incidents. Unfortunately, near misses are often underreported because employees are afraid of getting into trouble.

According to Safety.BLR.com, reporting can be discouraged by a culture of blaming and disciplinary action associated with mistakes or unsafe behavior. You’ll only get employees to report incidents that could lead to accidents in a blame-free environment where employees see positive action taken to eliminate hazards.

To encourage employees to report near-miss incidents:

  • Place no blame and take no disciplinary action for reporting near misses.
  • Allow anonymous reporting.
  • Investigate all near misses the same way you do accidents and publish finding.
  • Praise employees and contractors for reporting near misses.

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Help Is Just a Few Clicks Away

Preventing accidents is a central focus of your job. Coping with near misses and other safety incidents and using them to improve workplace safety is tough, demanding work. But you have help if you’re a Safety.BLR.com subscriber.

There are a multitude of expert safety and health resources available on Safety.BLR.com to help you deal with close calls and so many other vital workplace safety issues.

That’s why we think Safety.BLR.com is such a terrific resource for safety professionals. In addition to providing you with sound advice about managing safety responsibilities, this comprehensive safety website also provides you and your trainers with more than 185 prewritten safety meetings on just about any topic you can imagine, including close calls and accident prevention. When employees are properly trained to work safely, you eliminate the human error factor involved in so many near misses and accidents.

Training responsibilities become a snap with the website’s thousands of audio presentations, PowerPoints®, meetings, toolbox talks, trainer’s guides, and much, much more. You’ll find training tools on more than 150 safety topics along with plain-English compliance analysis and other resources.

At a time when budget considerations are paramount, what makes more sense than an all-in-one safety training and compliance solution?

But as important as employee and supervisor training resources are, there’s a lot more to Safety.BLR.com. The newly revamped website offers all kinds of safety management resources, including white papers on every imaginable workplace safety topic, regulatory news, the opportunity to hear what your colleagues have to say about their accident prevention strategies and about their experiences with other safety problems and solutions, and so much more.

You’ll be amazed by all the features and functionality offered by Safety.BLR.com. Highlights include:

  • Side-by-Side State/Federal Compliance. By placing our state and federal regulatory analysis side by side, you easily see how to fully comply with both governmental entities.
  • MSDS Library Expansion. The site now provides an immense library of 3.5 million MSDS forms, with about 10,000 more added or changed every week. Need one? Just call up the chemical by name, manufacturer, product group, or CAS number, and then print it out.
  • Newsletter Wizard. If you’ve ever wanted to publish a safety newsletter but felt lacking in editorial skills, this new addition is for you.
  • Plan Builder. Select from our library of safety plans, customize them to suit your company’s needs, and assemble them into collections you can save in our personal library.

We’re pretty excited about Safety.BLR.com, and we’re eager for you to experience it, too. That’s why we’ve created a complimentary site tour, available here. It takes just 5 minutes.

If you like what you see, you’re invited to try the site at no cost and with no obligation. We’ll even give you a complimentary special report for doing so. Go here to take a 5-minute tour of the new Safety.BLR.com. It may be just what you’re looking for.

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