Near-Misses: An Assessment Tool in Construction

{Photo courtesy of Flickr user Drew’s Photo Shoots via a Creative Commons license]

The Missing Piece?

OK, so maybe that last part isn’t foremost in our minds, but still … Let’s fact it, there is usually a lot less work, stress and evaluation when there is a near-miss (or a “near-hit,” depending on your perspective) in construction incidents than when an incident actually takes place which results in property or personal damage.

The construction industry is perhaps the most consistently dangerous sector of the economy, in terms of incidents and fatalities in a given year.  And we as safety professional have done an amazing job in reducing the rate of incidents throughout the industry worldwide over the last 20-30 years. There is still a lot of work to be done, considering that there are still more than 1,000 people who die from construction-related incidents and injuries each year.

Can We Do Better?

While the overall trajectory of incidents and deaths has been down over the last couple decades, the rate has actually plateaued in some respects in recent years, which can suggest any number of things.

Could it be that we have reached “statistical zero” in incidents and injuries? Could it be that the injuries are going up at the same rate as the construction industry is adding workers? Could it be that our assessment models have reached their peak efficacy and we can’t do any better at evaluating incidents in order to prevent future incidents?

Each of those explanations could be feasible, but really it seems that the last explanation is the one that three people wanted to address in their collaborative article in the May 2016 issue of Professional Safety magazine. Eric Marks, Ibukun Awolusi and Brian McKay combined to write a piece about near-hit (or “near-miss”) events in the construction industry and their value as a tool for assessing safety at a construction site.

The concept behind the article is to take a new look at how construction sites are assessed for safety. Many times, the authors claim, safety of a site or of a company is often based on “lagging indicators,” or data from the past such as numbers of incidents, injuries, deaths, causal factors in the cases, and various other information.

Don’t Miss the Near-Miss!

And while the authors agree that those can be important data points, what is often lacking are the “leading indicators” which can foretell a possible site of an incident in the future. One of the best leading indicators – that is, one of the best predictors of future trouble – comes in the form of the “near-hit” event, and evaluating those events as if they were actual incidents can provide valuable insights that could help prevent the next near-hit or incident.

What the authors were looking to achieve with their article, titled “Near-Hit Reporting: Reducing Construction Industry Injuries,” was to discuss the concept of a near-hit management system, discuss its value and insights and how assessing near-hits can go a long way toward breaking the plateau of incident rates and start the trajectory again in its downward trend.

In the most recent Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) data available from the U.S. government, the construction industry accounts for about 6 percent of all “non-fatal” injuries in the private sector. That is down from nearly 11 percent of all such incident from the early 90s until 2010, and is down from nearly 9 percent of all such incidents in 2011 alone. So while the numbers are down, there is still a disproportionate number of these incidents relative to the private sector workforce in general.

There is clearly progress being made, but there is much work to do, and in order to do the work necessary to further mitigate these types of incidents (or worse – those which cause fatalities), the authors of this piece wanted to present the missed opportunity that is the “near-hit” incident that is not assessed and analyzed the way it should be.

In my next post, I’ll take this article and look into the leading indicators in construction safety and look at how near-hit events are recorded and tracked across the economy. What do you think we’ll find when we loo at construction specifically in relation to everyone else?

Your feedback is appreciated before Friday, then we can all find out together!