Learning from near-miss incidents

Why reporting close calls is essential to improving workplace safety.

Have you ever tripped on a power tool’s extension cord or slipped on a patch of ice while doing a circle check of your vehicle—but caught yourself from falling at the last second? You weren’t injured, so no big deal, right? But it’s important to not simply shrug off these near-miss incidents.

“Every near miss is a lesson waiting to be learned,” says Adam Carruthers, a Health and Safety Consultant at IHSA. Each one is a warning sign highlighting a potential hazard or weakness in a workplace’s health and safety program.

Reporting a close call gives supervisors and employers the chance to investigate it in order to prevent similar events from happening again.

“The idea is to turn reported near misses into opportunities for improvement, ensuring a safer workplace for your team,” Carruthers says.

The value of reporting near misses

In the industries IHSA serves, near misses usually relate to common hazards such as slips, trips, and falls, working at heights, and struck-bys. When these occurrences are formally reported, it becomes possible to determine the conditions, decisions, and actions that contributed to them—whether that’s unsafe equipment operation or poor maintenance, risky worker behaviour, bad weather, communication failures, or improper training, among many other potential factors.

Workplaces gain numerous benefits when all near misses are reported and investigated, including:

Compliance with regulations: A good near-miss reporting system promotes improved workplace hazard assessments, which helps ensure those hazards are controlled in compliance with the law.

Enhanced safety procedures: Analyzing near-miss data over time enables employers to identify health and safety performance gaps that may exist. In doing so, they can allocate resources to address the workplace’s biggest concerns.

Learning opportunities: It’s one thing to be told about the risks of a workplace incident; it’s another to know that your co-worker almost suffered the real-life consequences. Sharing near-miss information drives the health and safety message home, making it more likely that those hazards will be remembered by workers.

Cost savings: Proactively identifying and controlling hazards (as a result of near-miss reporting) can help workplaces avoid the financial consequences of lost-time injuries, such as medical costs, replacement costs, downtime, legal fees, and reputational damage.

On the other hand, failing to report and investigate the conditions that lead to near misses means that those conditions are left unaddressed. According to the Safety Triangle, a long-accepted theory of industrial incident prevention, the more near misses that occur at a workplace, the more likely it is that a serious incident or even a fatality will happen. Near misses are therefore referred to as a leading indicator of health and safety performance: how often they occur can help predict the likelihood of more serious incidents in the future.

Best practices for near-miss reporting

The sooner and more often that close calls are reported, the sooner investigations can be conducted and preventive measures can be put in place.

But that reporting doesn’t just happen; it needs to be encouraged. To do that, employers can implement the following practices:

• Build a safety-first culture that promotes shared responsibility and active participation in health and safety by all workplace parties.
• Foster open communication and make it clear that workers can share their concerns, observations, and suggestions without fear of judgment or other negative consequences.
• Ensure the process for reporting near misses—whether it requires filling out a paper document or an online form—is straightforward, user-friendly, and easy to access.
• Demonstrate that near-miss reports are taken seriously by investigating them thoroughly and sharing any corrective or preventive measures that are put in place as a result.

Reporting essentials

Different companies have different incident-reporting processes. For example, an initial report might be as straightforward as a worker telling a supervisor, “I almost got hit in the head”; the supervisor would then handle all formal paperwork. Other organizations might take a more structured approach, with basic details reported first and follow-up reporting completed after an investigation has taken place.

In general, a near-miss report should include the following details:

• Date and time of the report (i.e., when it’s filled out).
• Full name, contact information, and role of the reporting person.
• What happened—including the date, time, and exact location of the near miss.
• Details of work being carried out before the occurrence.
• Names and positions of any other involved parties—including statements, if possible.
• Underlying causes or factors that led to the near miss.
• Potential outcomes if the near-miss had resulted in an injury.
• Immediate corrective action(s) taken.
• Recommended preventive actions, such as changes to procedures or additional training.
• Names and positions of individuals responsible for completing these actions—plus expected completion dates.
• Signatures of the initial reporting person and supervisors involved.

“Reporting near-miss incidents isn’t just about what almost happened—it’s about preventing what could happen next,” Carruthers says. “Each report is a step toward a safer workplace for everyone.”