Near-misses can be wake-up calls. If we choose to wake up.

If we instead choose to thinkk of them as just a dream, as something that could have happened, but did not, and we just count our lucky stars, we could well be missing the most instructive event to occur on our work site.

Oh sure, we could learn a lot after an incident occurs that causes damage and/or injury, but are we going to put our head in the sand when an incident could have happened except for a slightly different position or slightly different timing? Do you help ourselves but just calling a near-miss a “lucky break” or “dodging a bullet” and not be open to what it might teach us?

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

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

Teachable Moments

Anytime you come close to having a reportable incident, those near-misses can help us shed some light on our workplace and its overall safety. As was covered in my last post, which started this current series, near-misses can and should be a valuable tool for checking on our overall safety and helping us understand better how certain incidents happen and why, so we can proactively address issues to further drag down the incident occurrence rate in the construction industry, which is still the most dangerous work environment among workers – taking the lives of more than 1,000 people every year.

While we are always grateful when an event is a near-miss and not a reportable incident, if we leave it as just gratitude, we miss out on the wonderful learning opportunity in understanding where we failed in our systems and what we can change so that the fate of timing or positioning doesn’t break in a negative way next time. The interesting thing is, for as dangerous as the construction industry is, it is generally lagging behind other industries in using near-misses as assessment and evaluation tools.

That is the foundation behind the article in the May 2016 issue of Professional Safety magazine, which discusses near-misses (also called “near-hits”) and the value of a near-hit management program in the construction industry.

Leading vs. Lagging Indicators

When it comes to incidents, using data such as causal factors for incidents, time, place, employee, work being performed, conditions of the site and/or equipment, etc., of past incidents can be valuable in determining trends where higher risks seem to occur. Looking at the past for clues to the future creates what are called lagging indicators. These can be useful to a certain extent in terms of helping companies understand that if nothing changes in their safety protocols or risk-management systems, the company can predict with reasonable assurance what incidents are more likely to occur in the future and what the general severity of those incidents might be.

There are some industries who have been looking more proactively by addressing what are called leading indicators,ro those which suggest issues in the future. A near-miss event can provide a plethora of leading indicators, especially within our safety systems and overall worksite management. In other words, if we have a near-miss and we analyze the event as to what happened and why an incident did not occur, we could learn some things that might predict an incident occurring in the future if nothing changes. A good example might be a near-miss that wasn’t an incident only out of “luck.”

Near-Misses in Other Industries

On the whole, the construction industry is really behind the curve when it comes to using near-misses as reportable and assessable events in safety management. Whether it’s because there are so many actual incidents that are reported and investigated that there is a belief that there are no resources to do the work of evaluating a near-miss, is not really of concern for the authors of this article, which is titled “Near-Hit Reporting: Reducing Construction Industry Injuries.”

What the authors of the article were looking into is to help express how near-miss reporting and management has benefited other industries as they have taken a more pro-active role in mitigating risks and incidents. Several industries have incorporated near-miss reporting databases through FEMA to help workers in those industries across the country become more awareness of the risky situations to which they are exposed.

Those with FEMA databases for near-miss reporting include law-enforcement and firefighters, while other industries such as aviation, medicine and chemicals/hazardous materials and nuclear energy management have hear-miss assessment protocols. And what of construction?

To be fair, a major construction firm has its own near-miss reporting system, and it found a correlation in near-hit reporting to a reduction in significant injury incident rates. For example, a reporting rate of 0.5 near-misses per person per year translates into a reduction in injury-incident rate by more than 75 percent. Imagine that, even half as successful across the entire construction industry. Suddenly the 1,000 construction-related deaths per year drops to less than 700. With similar effectiveness as that major firm, the number drops to less than one death per day.

So what now? The authors of this piece take the next step and start creating a framework for helping the construction industry begin implementing a near-miss management program for events that are somewhat specific to the industry – and which could actually reduce overall paperwork of incidents because a proper framework and program in place o near-misses could greatly reduce the number oof incidents that occur, and thus reduce the time and money spent on incident reports and investigations.