Even today, many industry professionals, including top management, believe that better levels of safety translate only through technical adjustments and additional equipment. For every accident that causes personal injury, loss of property or interruption of activities, there were hundreds of previous minor accidents or incidents of lesser impact. An effective record of these minor incidents and accidents should be considered as an important part of a strategy to reduce the frequency of those most serious accidents, as well as a performance indicator for the current safety management system.
If used properly, the information contained in these records can help the company to focus the deviations and then correct them before they can result in some event of more serious consequences. However, if these small accidents and particularly small incidents are not recorded, the company’s management will have no way of knowing if the designed protective measures are being maintained and applied effectively.
Normally, serious accidents are not strange and unprecedent events. If a serious accident occurs, it is very likely that some or all of related previous events have been repeated in the past, but by luck or quick reasoning of some employee, a major loss did not happen. These events can be classified as dangerous occurrences, “near misses”, incidents or minor accidents, but regardless of how they are called, they have a major influence on the overall level of safety and the likelihood of major accidents.
This topic addresses, among other things:
- Heinrich’s Law & Bird’s Pyramid.
- Importance of the organizational climate in Incident Management.
- Definition of Accident and Incident.
- Means of Identification and Communication of incidents and accidents.
- “Near Misses”.
- Categorization of Accidents.
- Security Culture Development
