Accidents versus near misses

In the proposal to the Commission of the European Communities (CEC) to start a European Platform for researchers and practioners in Near Miss Reporting (see section 7.1.) the following position was taken (Van der Schaaf, 1988a)  

Accidents are only the tip of the iceberg they materialise out of sudden unsafe situations, which in turn are often caused by undesirable operator behaviour (human error). We have to know much more about these underlying precursors of actual accidents if we aim at more fundamental understanding of the process of accident production. 

Moreover another important, so far neglected, aspect of human behaviour 

The two reasons mentioned above are of a fundamental nature they aim at an improvement of the quality of (near-) accident reports. The third reason is more practical and should increase the quantity of reported cases. 

Accidents are very rare relative to the number of near accidents and human errors. Fortunate as it may seem, this poses a real problem for complex systems with a high catastrophy potential (nuclear power plants, chemical plants, commercial aviation) few accidents means few cases to analyse and hardly any feedback to learn from. This leads to the undesirable situation of ad-hoc corrective measures after each single accident, because the database is far too small to generate statistically sensible preventi ve measures. 

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Wright L.B., 2002. Accident versus near miss causation, PhD thesis, University of Strathcycle, Glasgow. 

Wright L.B., Schaaf van der T.W., 2003. Accident versus near miss causation a critical review of the literature, an empirical test in the UK railway domain, and their implications for other Sections, ESReDA Seminar on Safety Investigation of Accidents, Petten. 

This chapter starts with a discussion of the usefulness of incident reporting systems (of accidents and near misses) and then goes on to compare accidents versus near misses with the help of a qualitative iceberg model Next, three different purposes to collect and analyse such incidents are outlined. Finally, several methods to collect near misses in a variety of settings are presented. 

One much-discussed distinction is between the predictive perspective versus the retrospective perspective (0ien et al. 2011a). Here the distinction is made between indicators to predict the possibility of having a major accident tomorrow and indicators to determine causes and contributing factors after an accident or near miss. 

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