Health & safety bulletin
Near miss reporting
9th November 2007
As previously reported, we are making great progress in increasing vigilance, reporting near misses and sharing the lessons learnt. Some of our teams have expressed to management privately that they feel very uncomfortable with “reporting” that they have done something wrong, or “reporting” that they have noticed an unsafe act involving a colleague and addressing it to prevent a potential incident.
Below is an excerpt from the response of one of our very proactive customers to a near miss that involved one of our teams. At the time of the incident, the cause of the near miss was identified, a toolbox talk was delivered to the team involved (who were doing everything else in a very safe manner) and the findings were built into a bulletin entitled Protecting your work area.
Hopefully the response endorses that we and our customers will not allocate blame, but will use your findings and suggestions to raise awareness of potential hazards and put procedures in place to overcome them.
Excerpt from the e-mail as follows:-
Steve,
As part of the monthly review of the ALERT BBS Web Solution, one of the near misses selected for discussion was Near Miss no. 505. This near miss was reported by yourself and was a direct result of the Alert Observation no. 4190 which you carried out.
On behalf of myself and all of whom participated on the call-in, I would like to congratulate you on the quality and content of both the near miss & the AO. All participating members of the session were most impressed with the pro-active nature of the near miss. The fact that this near miss involved your own engineers further demonstrates how the ALERT system is being embraced by yourselves and the other contractors as an invaluable learning tool and not as a means to lay blame or carry out a 'finger pointing exercise'.
Many thanks for your contributions and keep up the good work!
Our Near Miss reporting is now better than ever before and can only go on improving with your support.
As our customer pointed out, it is our teams who are doing the good work. Thank you to those who are taking the time to look around and take the trouble to report their findings.