Near miss

A near-miss is an unplanned event that could have caused injury, illness, or damage but did not — the dropped tool that missed the worker, the gas test that caught a leak before ignition, the slip that did not end in a fall. Capturing near-misses is a proxy for organisational safety culture, because low report counts usually signal under-reporting, not a safe site. The sites that report the most near-misses are typically the safest, because reporting is what lets a program act before the same hazard produces an injury.

The operational value of a near-miss is that it is a free lesson — the hazard fired without the cost of a recordable case. A program that logs, triages, and closes near-misses gets the leading-indicator benefit (the rate moves before TRIR does) and the hazard-removal benefit (the same condition is corrected before the next crew walks into it). A program that does not capture near-misses pays for the lesson twice — once as the near-miss it ignored, once as the recordable case it became. See incident and leading indicator.