Near-Misses: Get Them Framed!

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

Having a societal, professional, or legal framework will tend to keep some semblance of order and predictability in our lives, and will often (if executed properly) take the politics out of any situation and address equality in almost every situation – if not, at least fairness or justice (those are all terms that are not the same thing, by the way).

Near-Misses and Their Fairness

A framework is necessary in safety, too, as we need to be able to objectively look at any incident or near-miss and evaluate and assess it honestly to determine what happened and what changes should be made so that event does not happen again. Near-misses, for all their chaos, have a certain fairness to them – if something is done wrong, a near-miss can happen as easily as an incident, and the fairness is for it to be a warning shot in the hopes that we can recognize a problem and fix it before someone actually gets hurt.

And this concept of a framework applies to near-misses especially. We need to get out of the mentality that a near-miss, especially on a construction site, is just a “lucky” event and is not worth investigating. That is the crux of an article in the May 2016 issue of Professional Safety magazine, which covers near-miss (called “near-hit” in the article) events in the construction industry. The industry, despite all the progress made in minimizing major incidents, is still the most dangerous for workers, as more than 1,000 people die annually from work-related incidents on construction sites.

And for all that, the construction industry as a whole has been slow to implement near-miss assessment programs – which are much more prevalent in other industries such as hazardous materials, law enforcement, fire-fighting and medicine.

And that, friends, is not fair – especially to your workers.

Constructing a Framework

So now that we are establishing an awareness, thanks to the article by Eric Marks, Ibukun Awolusi and Brian McKay and this current blog series, we can move ahead to what to do next. While other industries have their own ways of tracking near-misses and gathering and sharing data, the construction industry needs to follow suit.

Every framework, specifically, is different according to the industry, but here are general steps that should be taken. This article takes a look at developing a framework that should help the construction industry address near-misses and convert them from “lucky breaks” into teachable moments.

• Step 1: When there is a near-miss, start identifying details about the event. In other words, start to treat it as if it were a reportable incident without the property or body damage. Check out any unsafe conditions or dangerous work that was present at the time of the event, and assess the protocols in place. If the event was particularly dangerous, then workers should be trained to recognize these events and stop working until the dangerous situation is rectified. And workers should be adequately trained as floor-level safety officers to be able to recognize and report conditions that are dangerous and report any near-miss situation immediately.
• Step 2: This is often the most difficult step, which is reporting a near-miss. Why? Sometimes workers don’t recognize a near-miss, other times they might feel it’s their fault and they don’t want to risk consequence. While the information that is reported may depend on the company, there should be something in place to allow for workers to report events confidentially, whether the worker was actively involved in the event or was merely an observer.
• Step 3: After the data have been gathered in the report of the near-miss, is the analysis of the data. This is where it may be helpful to categorize near-misses and put the causal factors into their own sub-categories, such as those based on skill, rules, knowledge, machinery, time, or any other factor that may be found, using something like the Eindhoven Classification Model (ECM) as a guide.
• Step 4:  Once the data is gathered and the analysis is completed, next is the time to start looking at solutions, especially if there are a series of related near-misses (this is called a trend of trouble, folks). Determining the solutions can be made easier as the root causes are plugged into their correct categories in an ECM table, and politics is removed to get at the honest reality of what happened and the best steps to fix the issue so it doesn’t recur.
• Step 5: This is where information about the near-miss should be communicated. No near-miss event should ever be placed in a vacuum, where it only maters to those workers in the immediate vicinity of an event. All personnel should be informed as soon as practicable that a near-miss event occurred, along with the facts of the event, the root causes and what solutions (if any) were implemented or need to be implemented so the specific work area will be safe for all. The more informed everyone is about such events, the more aware everyone will be of the next near-miss event and be able to address it quickly to maintain safety of all involved.