We still need to learn from Near-miss Incidents

Any near-miss incident that occurs in the workplace should be viewed as a warning or an indication that something is wrong.  Now a near-miss can be many things to different people, what we are looking at is those that can end up as personal injuries or damage to machinery and equipment.

Lets consider a typical and very simple accident of an office worker who slips on spilt coffee in the canteen; which results in the worker falling onto their leg and fracturing their ankle.  Now this can be avoided if a near-miss situation is reported and acted upon before things can escalated to the next level of failure.

Now imagine how many times people walk pass things like spilt water on the floor. It’s fairly certain that the majority of people do nothing about the situation. It’s like they are walking by with blinkers on and pretending it has nothing to do with them.

In today’s society many people have attended safety training either in inductions or more specialist areas. So there really is no excuse for not reporting hazards, which can result in near-misses or actual accidents.

So how can we turn a near-miss event into a positive contribution to accident prevention?  First, we need to recognize these types of events as a serious warning. Next, we must report and correct the situation or remove the hazard that presents a potential near-miss.  One thing for sure we must always strive to prevent any repeats of hazards and near-miss events ever arising again in the workplace environment.

By promoting and communicating a constant safety awareness among all levels of staff a company can create a safety culture which encourages the reporting of near-misses and also a trust in that reported problems or defects will be rectified.  If we ignore to act then it will be like sitting in your office waiting for a volcano to erupt, not knowing when or what will happen when it does.

So remember if you see a hazard, report it before an accident takes place