When a workplace accident almost happens but gets stopped shortly beforehand, that’s called a near miss incident. Tracking these incidents is a useful way to gather information about accidents without anyone actually being hurt, and that information can then be used to isolate dangerous conditions or workplace hazards. Every company differs in its health and safety management, but there are a few general ways to make the near miss incident tracking process more efficient and useful for improving the safety of your work environment. The most useful two tracking tips are tracking by location and by category, for the reasons detailed below.
- Track by location: Certain areas will be more susceptible to regular accidents than others. Some areas have common-sense reasons for being more accident-prone than others. For example, entrances and exits will probably have more slips and falls because of outside precipitation that gets tracked in. Some other potential disaster areas could be less obvious, however, and so looking to near miss accident data will provide help for future incident protection planning. Keeping track of the accidents that always happen on a location-by-location basis should indicate areas where an accident could happen soon.
- Track by categories: Hazards will naturally lend themselves to categorization based on the types of accidents they can cause. As part of your own health and safety program, categories can be customizable to your specific workplace environment. Examples of common categories that could be used include things like falling objects, vehicular incidents, spills, and electrical and fire hazards. Tracking near miss incidents by categories provides data on when a given type of accident might happen, meaning that the workers interacting with certain equipment can protect themselves against imminent danger.
Combining these two tactics and tracking near miss incidents by both category and location means that you can provide information on what kinds of accidents may happen soon as well as exactly where they might take place. This information is crucial to ensuring workplace safety and preventing those incidents, so it pays not to overlook near miss accident tracking.
