It’s when a mishap just about happened, but it didn’t. Imagine with me for a while…. You drive in to work on a cold January day. You park in your usual spot and step out of your vehicle. You slip on the frost on the pavement and you lose your balance. You quickly grab the car handle and you don’t fall. You also do not sustain any injury due to the jerking motion of your body in your frantic effort to regain your footing. You don’t have any pain or discomfort from the event. This was a near miss.

What benefits are there to reporting a Near Miss?

So, you didn’t fall and you don’t have any pain or discomfort of any kind from the little slipping event. You think nothing of it and you go about your day without saying anything to anyone about it. You think it’s not a big deal and besides, if you told our boss, you’d be embarrassed.  So, why is the safety office teaching you that Near Misses are important and you need to report it to your supervisor?

The answer is really quite simple — it is important because there are many other employees who will also come to work, step out of their vehicle onto a frost covered parking lot and slip… only they may not be as lucky as you were, and they fall. They land on their back and dislocate a disk or worse, their head snaps backwards and they hit so hard it knocks them out. They are rushed to the hospital where they lay in a coma for four days before dying. Is that an extreme exaggeration? No. Slips, trips and falls are quite common and the results are often severe and can be life threatening.

If the Near Miss had been reported, corrective action could have been taken to get some salt or sand down on the pavement and this may help to prevent the next person from experiencing a severe injury or worse.

So, this is why the safety office is asking each employee to reconsider the Near Misses that they have and encouraging them to report it to their supervisor. The supervisor will report the Near Miss in ESAMS and this will notify the Safety Office staff of the need to investigate and determine the best corrective action to try to prevent an injury.

Let’s work together as one team to prevent injuries.

For questions, call (360) 476-6287 or (360) 396-6106.