Usefulness of accident-and near miss reporting

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. 

Reason s position may be illustrated by examining figure 3.1, showing four different feedback loops of information for safety management  

As a reaction to Reason s criticism, in this thesis it is fully agreed that accident- and near miss reporting alone would be insufficient to support effective safety management however, this must be true of any single specific tool or approach, considering the enormous complexity and variety of inci- 

we shall see in section 3.3., Reason s proposal to use an auditing tool of a standard set of faulty management decisions clearly aims only at the Monitoring purpose of near miss reporting, perhaps also somewhat at the purpose of Alertness , but certainly does not contribute to Modelling , i.e, to understanding how the development from left to right in his model can occur. 

Our conclusion therefore is that the auditing tool described by Reason may certainly complement a NMMS as described in Chapter 4, and might also serve to cross-check the NMMS s results on Organisational factors (see Chapter 5), but will not be able to replace a NMMS aimed at all three purposes to be outlined in section 3.3. 

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