Near Miss Incident and Accident Recall

It has often been said that past experience usually predicts future trends. The same can be said for safety. Accidents that have occurred in the past tend to recur and the same basic causes also are present. Numerous near miss incidents often predict accidents. 

Recalling the past to improve the future is of vital importance in a safety management system and the reason that most programs fail is that the underlying near miss incidents are never reported, investigated, or eradicated. 

Numerous safety programs are still injury prevention programs and only concentrate on the serious or disabling injury and the minor injuries as indicated in the accident ratio models. 

The accident ratio (first discussed by H. W. Heinrich in the 1930s [1931]) has a clear message  

Accidents and not injuries should be the point of attack. Analysis proves that for every 

---

There are various methods of conducting both near miss incident and accident recall and the two main methods are the. formal and informal recall sessions. 

Appointment of a health and safety representative Holding regular safety meetings Safety communication sessions Near miss incident and accident recall Safety promotion... 

Many organizations show specific safety DVDs to remind employees of past accidents in an effort to raise awareness. The showing of a film, and relating it to, either a near miss incident, or accident recall, is a good idea. Safety DVDs often have high risk acts or high risk conditions portrayed and these scenes could act as reminders and prompts for the accident or near miss incident recall session. 

Near miss incident recall and accident recall are ideal methods of recalling various accidents and near miss incidents in an effort to remind people of what went wrong in the past and also to highlight potential near miss incidents that may have not been reported via the formal system. It is a method to learn from past mistakes. 

The importance of near miss incident recall cannot be emphasized enough. Accidents that cause injury, damage, and production losses are recognized as being important and are reported and investigated. Many near miss incidents are ignored and not reported or acted on. 

Essentially, the incident recall technique may be used to identify unsafe acts, unsafe conditions, non-compliance with safe systems of work, and near-miss accidents by following a confidential interviewing procedure to a stratified random sample of employees. Each interviewee is asked to recall and report verbally any of the above-mentioned situations in which he was involved or has knowledge. Details of near-miss accidents are then obtained to enable remedial action to be taken before further similar accidents result in both damage and injury. 

From this it can be seen that the majority are either near misses or damage only accidents, so that any accident control programme, for its greatest effect, must concentrate much of its attention on these two areas. Related techniques of damage control and incident recall are dealt with in sections 9.4.2 and 10.12 and also by Bamber . 

---