How to Make It Happen

Business focus has always been on productivity and, in the current environment, it is even more acute. Managers are generally not keen to see workers spending time on nonproductive activities, such as filling in reports or to devote additional resource to investigation and rectification of events that caused no harm. 

Certainly, near miss incident reports and the follow-up actions are time consuming and probably add additional expense. The bottom line is that accidents are not good for business, and proven ways to avoid and eliminate accidents, such as acting on near miss incident information, should be the highest priority. 

There is a real opportunity for safety improvement by applying a critical level of focus to the near miss incident Both managers and workers at the coalface (the exposed seam of coal in a mine) need to be encouraged to develop comprehensive systems that can capture, analyze, and rectify close calls and, thus, prevent future accidents occurring. 

Near misses need to be recognized as a free, extremely valuable resource in the battle to create an accident-free workplace. 

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There are few short term solutions that we can think of. The technology for accessing publications underwent a dramatic makeover in the last decade, moving from predominantly paper to predominantly electronic through a coordinated set of efforts from publishers and consumers (in this case scientific research users) alike. A study of how such a transition was successfully handled could provide clues on how to make it happen. 

Planning a Life in Medicine- Discover if a Medical Career is Right for You and Learn How to Make it Happen (Career Guides), by John Smart, Stephen Nelson, and Julie Doherty, Princeton Review, 2005. 

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