Enterprise Training Solutions Blog

Imagine you’re walking around a corner in your warehouse and a forklift speeds past you, almost taking your head off. You wheel backward jumping over cables and extension cords littering the ground.

Before crashing into a shelving unit and knocking down expensive packages, you steady yourself.

You’ve just experienced a near miss.

Instead of writing this incident off as a “close call” or a “fluke,” you should file a near miss report.

But many managers and employees don’t practice near miss reporting. Or they don’t quite know why it’s important.

We’ll tell you why it’s important, how to write one, and how you can develop a culture and program of near miss reporting.

But first, let’s define near miss reporting.

What is Near Miss Reporting?

Near miss reporting goes by many names – near miss incident report, near miss accident report, or near hit – but they all mean the same thing:

An unplanned event that could’ve caused human, environmental, or equipment damage but didn’t cause harm because of a fortunate “break” in the chain of events.

So if no one is hurt and the business doesn’t suffer an interruption in operations, why does a near miss report matter?

The Importance of Near Miss Reporting

A near miss is a warning sign of potential future accidents.

Near miss reports give managers and employees information about their current work conditions, processes, and systems and hints at possible solutions to dangers in the workplace.

Without near miss reports, workplaces may simply rely on “days without an accident” to track their progress and level of workplace safety.

But “days without an accident” don’t tell you anything about how to improve workplace safety – it merely tells you that the workplace is presumably safe.

Near miss reporting, on the other hand, is a useful tool for driving continuous safety improvements across your organization – which is one of many advantages near miss reports provide.

Benefits of Near Miss Reporting

The benefits of near miss reporting are varied and far-reaching. Apart from helping managers identify unsafe workplace conditions, here are a few additional benefits:

• Promotes a workplace culture of safety by encouraging others to report near misses
• Prevents future accidents by educating employees on how accidents almost occurred so they don’t make the same mistakes
• Proactively reduces near misses and accidents by encouraging employee participation and looking for any and all things that contribute to unsafe conditions and eliminating or reducing them
• Provides data for statistical analysis to identify unsafe workplace trends and track performance of individuals (after all, some near misses can be attributed to people, not just machines or systems)

So you can see why near miss reporting is important, but how do you actually create a near miss report?

How to Write a near Miss Report

If you or your employees experience a near miss, here’s what to include in your near miss incident report:

• Date of near miss
• Time of near miss
• Location of near miss
• Names of people involved, including employees, supervisors, and managers
• Departments involved
• Sequence of events leading to the near miss
• Mode of action of the employees involved (walking, running, climbing, lifting, operating machinery, etc.)
• Environmental conditions surrounding the near miss
• Equipment used or present during near miss
• Analysis of the primary and secondary causes of the near miss
• Recommendations for corrective actions, policy changes, environmental changes, etc.

Now, one near miss report could go a long way. But if you want to engage your employees in contributing to a culture of safety reporting, then you have to design a strong near miss reporting program.

How to Design a Near Miss Reporting Program

To design a near miss reporting program, follow the steps below:

• Choose KPIs for near miss reporting and define the goals of your program such as “reduce near misses by 50%.”
• Make reporting near misses as easy as possible to increase the likelihood that most employees will take the time to create a report (and know that it won’t take much time to do so).
• Get every leader in your organization involved and excited about the near miss reporting program – if they’re not onboard, your employees won’t be either.
• Educate your employees on the benefits of near miss reporting to ensure buy-in from them.
• Define near misses for your employees and give them concrete examples of near miss accidents.
• Monitor and track every near miss reported.
• Never punish your employees for reporting a near miss (even if it seems it was their fault). Near miss reports should be used for preventative measures only, not punitive actions.
• Always seriously investigate near miss incidents.
• Use near miss reports to drive organizational improvements in workplace safety.

One Essential Tool to Prevent Near Misses

We’ve given you plenty of ideas and actions for using near miss reporting to improve the safety conditions of your workplace.

But there’s one tool we didn’t mention:

Safety training.

If you don’t have updated safety policies, or aren’t continuously training yourselves and your employees in safety best practices and safety hazards (such as the top OSHA violations), then near miss reporting won’t be as effective as it could be.

To get the full benefits of near miss reports, you need to implement regular safety training.

That doesn’t mean you have to hire expensive speakers, or disrupt entire work days, or ruin your employees’ weekends with long training seminars.

On the contrary, you can easily provide quick safety lessons that stick in your employees’ minds long-term at a low cost.

How?

Through eLearning.

The low cost of eLearning combined with the effectiveness of microlearning makes it easy for you to quickly implement and deliver safety training to your employees in the comfort of their cubicles or homes.

Enterprise training provides a host of safety courses, covering topics from creating a safety program to laser safety training, for example.

We also offer a near miss reporting system ideal for capturing and preventing these events – to learn more, schedule your free consultation today!

No matter how robust your safety procedures are, accidents inevitably happen.

But why do accidents occur? Where do they originate? And what can we do to stop them from happening?

These are the types of questions the swiss cheese accident causation model attempts to answer.

The video below walks through its definition and an example of the model in practice.

After watching the video, continue reading because we’ll expand the definition, discuss its origins and key concepts, and show you how to apply its insights to your organization.

What is the Swiss Cheese Accident Causation Model?

The swiss cheese accident causation model is a theoretical model used in risk analysis, risk management, and risk prevention.

As the video above points out, “any components of an organization is considered a slice [of cheese] in this model. Management is a slice. Allocation of resources is a slice. An effective safety program is a slice. Operational support is a slice.”

But if there are any deficiencies or flaws in any of these “slices” of your organization or agency, then you will have a hole in that slice. Hence, swiss cheese.

If holes within each slice of your organization line up, meaning one weakness carries over into another weakness and so on, it creates a single hole throughout your organization – causing an accident.

Who Invented the Swiss Cheese Accident Causation Model?

The swiss cheese accident causation model was invented by James T. Reason and was first described in his well-known book Human Error.

In this book, he describes several famous disasters including the Challenger space shuttle accident and instead of simply discussing various causes for the accidents, he proposes an integrated theory of accident causation now known as the swiss cheese model.

What are the Key Concepts of the Swiss Cheese Model?

Reason was able to construct his integrated theory of accident causation through in-depth research into the nature of accidents, leading him to the following insights:

• Accidents are often caused by the confluence of multiple factors.
• Factors can range from unsafe individual acts to organizational errors.
• Many contributing factors to an accident are latent errors – they’re lying dormant waiting to be triggered by any number of active errors.
• Humans are prone to operational errors which require properly designed systems to mitigate the errors humans inevitably commit.

These insights form the key concepts behind the swiss cheese accident causation model.

What are Active and Latent Errors in the Swiss Cheese Model?

According to the US National Library of Medicine, Nearly all adverse events involve a combination of these two sets of factors:

Active Failures

Active failures or active errors are the unsafe acts committed by people.

An example of an active failure would be an employee who chooses not to follow safety procedures like cleaning flammable debris from a machine.

But according to the swiss cheese model, their active failure was not the ultimate cause of the accident. There are other factors at play.

Latent Conditions

Latent conditions or latent errors are the failures built into procedures, systems, buildings, or machines by the designers, builders, writers, or management.

Latent conditions are failures waiting to be triggered by an active error.

An example of a latent condition would be faulty fire alarm systems that are inoperable.

If you combine this latent condition with our example of an active failure – failing to clean flammable debris from a machine – you get a serious fire accident.

How to Apply the Swiss Cheese Model

While the swiss cheese model isn’t prescriptive, you can use its insights to improve the overall safety of your organization.

One way to prevent active errors is to know the top OSHA violations in 2017 to ensure your safety procedures match OSHA’s standards so your employees don’t make these common mistakes.

One way to prevent latent errors is to know the Government facilities management trends of 2018 and keep up-to-date with the latest technologies and practices to ensure the safest environments for your employees.

Beyond those two suggestions, you’ll need to regularly provide in-depth safety training to your employees. That’s difficult to do on a tight budget and little time to set aside for a week or a weekend’s worth of training.

But instead of in-person training, you can use the effectiveness of eLearning to train your employees quickly and easily using nothing more than their computers and an internet connection.

But to get the right training, you need an eLearning platform that specializes in producing courses on Government safety training.

Lucky for you, Enterprise Training specializes in all forms of Government training, and we have plenty of programs to satisfy your safety training requirements.