Using data from health and safety incident tracking to mitigate hazards and avoid future incidents makes your workplace safer and more efficient, therefore making your business more profitable. But did you know that tracking information about incidents that didn’t happen can give you these same benefits?
Near miss accidents are situations where an employee almost experienced an occupational illness or injury, but didn’t. The reasons why a near miss incident didn’t happen don’t matter for tracking purposes; they might have been avoided thanks to quick action by an employee or simply by good luck, but the only important facts about the near miss incident have to do with the situations that almost put an employee in harm’s way.
Using incident tracking software, your company can keep an eye on those situations. Asking employees to help in this process can be confusing at first, but as long as you integrate comprehensive near miss incident identification education into your comprehensive health and safety plan it should smooth out over time. All witnesses to a near miss accident should file reports, as should the employees directly involved in that near miss accident.
Once you have built a sufficient database in your incident tracking software, you can use that reported information to assess hazardous conditions that are present in your workspace. After completing a root cause analysis, in which you look at what exactly caused those conditions to occur, you can take corrective action and try to get rid of those causes.
If an actual accident does happen, having tracked near miss accident data through your safety software will save you time by providing situational data about the conditions that caused the incident and, in doing so, will fast-track understanding and hazard mitigation responses. That time saved will result in an environment that is safer for your employees more quickly and therefore provide a more efficient, profitable workspace.
