Right, first watch the clip
That is what is commonly known as a "near miss" - although sometimes (maybe more appropriately) termed as a "near hit". Watch it again. There are some significant points to note from the short clip
1. The lady composes herself quite quickly despite coming within a second of being vapourised - does this mean she's used to it?
2. No-one else looks too surprised by the passage - does this mean it happens all the time?
Anyway, we might guess that this is a fairly common occurrence and, possibly at this platform, it's not too rare an occurrence for worse to happen
Near miss reporting is a corner-stone of OH&S management. We learn from all sorts of experiences, accidents included, but the beauty of learning from near misses is that we learn before anyone gets hurt. They are great
The problem is, when you go and talk to any OHS manager about near miss reporting and you'll always get the same tale. The greatest challenge is persuading people to record them. That's right, all these wonderful opportunities to learn often go unreported, despite the better efforts of the OHS team - but why?
Because people are people, that's why
You can program a machine to do anything, even to self-destruct, and it will obey. A person on the other hand might do what you ask, but then maybe he won't. You see there are a lot of things going on inside the head of a person that we just can't ignore. Things like:
1. Will I get blamed for this?
2. If I don't do it, who'll know?
3. I've got more important things to do right now - I'll maybe do it later
4. I can't be bothered with all this paperwork, health & safety has gone mad
All these things have to be considered when implementing a system, simply because they exist. Near misses, you see, are quite different to accidents in a couple of key ways. Firstly there is often no victim, and secondly there may be no residual evidence of the occurrence. Consequently a lot of lessons that could be learned from near misses just disappear into the ether once the dust has settled and the debris has been hastily shovelled up. So what's the answer?
Well, we're not sure. But we did do some work a couple of years ago with a company that had attempted to improve near miss reporting by applying some statistics to it. Most OHS professionals will be familiar with the "Bird Triangle". That's the numerical hierarchy that suggests that, statistically, the ratio of near misses to non-serious accidents to serious accidents is about 300:30:1. Meaning that by the time we have a serious accident, we may have had several hundred opportunities to learn. Anyway, this company decided to allocate near miss reporting targets based on "Bird" to each department based on the average number of accidents they reported (they extrapolated the figures upward). So far so good, eh?
Well, it worked on paper ... but then people were introduced into the equation. Think about it. Department heads had to report "x" number of near misses on a monthly basis, say on the 28th of each month. The idea being that the "near miss log" is kept updated as and when these near misses happened. Right? Wrong! - the result was that very few near misses were logged in the early part of the month, but the log was back filled on or near the 28th each month following some sort of "creative team brainstorming session" - which no doubt usually took place in the canteen
So what's the point of the story? Only that people are people and we have to be realistic. The world is not perfect and self-interest will always be a factor. If our systems make the assumption that people are programmable and will simply do what they are told, our systems will ignore an inconvenient, but nonetheless inherent, and very real variable
Finally a word of comfort for all you OHS managers out there who may be struggling to get important points across to a reluctant and unwilling workforce. Well think yourself lucky. Imagine yourself explaining the importance of a near miss reporting system to the young lady in this clip ...
Maybe your guys ain't so bad, after all ...