Near Miss Reporting
Have you ever been driving along and seen something “Almost” happen where someone could have been hurt?
Have you ever been doing your job and something went wrong and you “Nearly” got hurt?
And what did you do about it?
I want to take a couple of minutes to ask you to think about Near Miss Reporting. This is where something happens to us where we are “Lucky” enough to get away with it.
My thoughts here are that if Near Miss Reporting is something that we all do regularly then we can use these near misses as a free lesson.
Near Miss Reporting is all about doing something to make sure it does not happen again.
A good example of Near Miss Reporting:
Sally operates a commercial sewing machine, it has a guard over the work area to protect the operator if a needle breaks which occurs regularly.
Sally had been working all day and had a couple of quick sewing runs to complete the job so she left the guard up and started sewing. The needle broke and flew off just past her ear. She thought to herself “That was lucky” and changed the needle and completed her work. There was no near miss report made.
Two days later another operator did exactly the same thing but this time when the needle broke it flicked into her eye requiring major eye surgery. She may lose her eye.
Now if there was a good system of Near Miss Reporting, Sally would have reported her incident and management may have implemented a system to make sure it could not happen again such as a lockout to make sure that the machine does not operate without the guard in place.
This is how Near Miss Reporting can work so make sure that your workplace has a system in place and it is important to encourage everyone to follow these procedures.
Another way to look at Near Miss Reporting is how would you feel if you had a near miss and did not get hurt but you did not say anything to anyone and a few days later one of your work mates got hurt or killed doing the exact same thing that you were! I would feel horrible if I had not said anything and then it happened to someone else.
So let’s encourage Near Miss Reporting and make it part of your every day.
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