Essentially, they argue that we should look at them as a failure, not a success, as they are leading indicators of incidents.  Citing the Process Improvement Institute, across many industries there are between 50 and 100 near misses recorded per serious incident, and about 10,000 smaller errors occur during that time.

It is also a great read.

With Incident Check, we have been focusing on that for years.  We provide the necessary tools to track near misses and provide roll-up statistics to show how many near misses are being recorded.

With Incident Check, we focus on the root cause analysis and provide a completely customizable  set of factors that are set up by your safety professional.

We start with a basic set, but you are free to remove all of them in order to set things up to work best with your company.  Our initial set consists of Immediate and Root Causes.  Under Immediate causes we have Unsafe Conditions and Unsafe Practices, under Root Causes we have Systemic Factors, Peronal factors, and Job factors.  We feel this is a very good base for people to use to really get at what is important – figuring out the underlying reasons for incidents and doing our best to eliminate them.

This is highlighted in our Pareto Charts that show the top 80% of factors leading to incidents, near misses, or hazards.  And we find that these charts become much more valuable over time.

A key component of our safety program is to identify general issues that our workers face based on the upcoming season.

In winter, cold and icy conditions play a huge factor in planning; likewise in summer we are on alert for extreme temperatures in the other direction, meaning plenty of sunscreen and water out in the field.

What about the milder seasons – spring and fall?  Well, with the [eventual] arrival of spring her in Alberta, issues that have been noted in the past are allergic reactions.  We have to be aware that insects now share the workspace outdoors, and pollen from plants can be heavy in the air.  For workers with allergies, proper preparation can mean the difference between completing a job safely and effectively and lost time due to the complications of not having medication.  Anyone allergic to bees is responsible for carrying EpiPens and our workers all have First Aid training, but reminders at the beginning of the season get people in the right frame of mind and raise awareness to the issues they may see in the field.

To ensure that we remember these, we note items such as these in our Actions Calendar.  I like to refer to the Actions Calendar as “Corrective Actions that are not tied to Incidents”.  By putting them in as a recurring action, you will get reminders and have a calendar layout that will remind you to bring it up at the appropriate safety meeting.

However, the concept of “mining the pyramid” is one where you look into all of the recorded near misses and incidents and begin identifying those that are high risk.  The intention is to drive out more of the trends that your company needs to focus on – those near misses and incidents that are serious but might be lost among all the other reporting.

We at Incident Check are looking to provide tools to facilitate this process – underlying every incident, hazard, and near miss report is the risk matrix with the severity and the liklihood of reccurrence giving the overall total risk.  We are now working on ways to highlight this inside of the existing Acident Pyramid to provide a strong visual representation of these events.