Overview of the thesis

Apart from this Introduction, and the Discussion and Conclusions in Chapter 9, three sections may be distinguished in this thesis  

Chapters 2 and 3 deal with the general backgrounds of industrial safety (e,g, models of accident causation and of human behaviour) and with the contributions that near miss reporting could make in understanding and controlling accidents and incidents, Also theoretical criticisms of the near miss reporting efforts are discussed here, 

Chapters 4, 5, and 6 give all the information regarding the theoretical aspects involved in designing a complete NMMS and ensuring its successful implementation and maintenance. A complete system to detect, describe, analyse and follow-up near misses is outlined (Chapter 4), with special emphasis on a model-based classification of system failure (Chapter 5) a number of key issues relating to organisational aspects like acceptance by employees, and safety cultures are discussed in Chapter 6, 

In Chapter 9 a discussion is presented of the lessons learned so far, followed by conclusions regarding the status-quo of near miss reporting. This then leads to a number of suggestions for fruitful topics and applications in the near future. 

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