Quality & safety
Near Miss
An incident that could have caused injury or damage but did not. It is the cheapest safety information a site will ever get — a full-cost lesson delivered at no cost, and most sites throw it away.
The value is that a near miss has the same causes as the injury it did not produce. The scaffold board that was not there, the load that swung, the isolation that was not done — the only difference between a near miss and a fatality is often where somebody happened to be standing.
And near-miss reporting collapses under punitive regimes. Punish the report and you do not get a safer site; you get a quieter one, and the next event is not a near miss.
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