Guidelines for identifying, analyzing and disseminating information on near misses in construction sites

Abstract

Near misses are well-known as a major source of proactive information for safety management. They are more frequent events than accidents and their causes may potentially result in an accident under slightly different circumstances. In the literature there are very few studies that investigate the characteristics of near misses in the construction industry, as well as its use in safety management. This article proposes guidelines for identifying, analyzing and disseminating information on near misses in construction sites. Based on an empirical study carried out in the construction of a hospital, 122 near misses were documented – 110 of them were identified by encouraging workers to formally report those events. The near misses were classified into five categories: (a) nature; (b) causal agent; (c) whether they provided positive or negative feedback for the safety management system; (d) priority, based on the risk associated with the event; (e) whether or not it was possible to track down the event. Among the main results, it must be pointed out that 86.7% of the events provided negative feedback and 12.7% of them were not possible to track down, which means that there was not enough information for investigating the causes of those events. Moreover, this study proposes set of guidelines for devising and information system for near misses, encompassing three stages: identification and registering of near misses (inputs); analysis of the events (processing); and information diffusion (outputs).