The importance of benchmarking safety standards with near-miss reporting

It’s no secret that heavy industry, regardless of sector, is a high-hazard work environment. This presents ongoing, changing risks. In fact, it’s estimated that every 7 seconds a worker is injured on the job. 

Benchmarking safety standards with near-miss reporting is a proven way to change this. It helps to identify, reduce, and eliminate heavy industry-related hazards and ensure safe working environments for everyone on your site.

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Why is near-miss reporting so important?

A near-miss is an unplanned event that had the potential to result in an injury, damage or hazard. These ‘close calls’ often reveal a weakness on worksites that will eventually lead to an incident. Just think, every serious worksite injury or fatality once started as a near miss!

Most of the time, human error is the cause of near-misses. Some of the time, system or process errors contributed. Failure to learn from near-misses and to address systemic problems leads to serious injuries and accidents, lost productivity and increased organisational costs.

Despite this, it’s estimated that 25% of safety incidents are not reported, and in Australia the rate is thought to be even higher at 31%, with some organisations reporting figures as high as 66%. 

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So how do we ensure near-misses are being reported?

There are some simple ways to ensure near-misses are being reported. Some include:

1. Ensure employees are supported to report near-misses. If they know they won’t be blamed they’ll be more likely to report close calls. You can even allow for employees to log these reports anonymously.
2. Make reporting easy. Whatever way your reports are filed make sure they are easily accessed and quick to fill out. No one wants to waste time on the job filling in forms.
3. Address problems quickly. If employees see management taking incidents seriously and acting quickly to resolve issues, they will see the importance of near-miss reporting.
4. Use AI Vision. This kind of tech acts like an extra set of eyes on your worksite. Take Blindsight as an example — not only can AI Vision see’ objects and potential threats, it’s been pre-trained to understand what they are and knows what actions to take before a worksite incident happens—alerting operators to high-risk scenarios. At the same time, Blindsight automates health and safety reporting, recording videos for further analysis of near-misses. This solves the problem of having to rely on people to report near-misses. 

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Why reporting near-misses isn’t enough

In Australia alone, nearly 500,000 people a year suffer from a work-related injury or illness while sadly, 45 people have already lost their lives in 2023. Simply reporting near-misses isn’t enough to change these statistics. 

While near miss reporting brings to light significant opportunities to improve worksite safety, we’re all aware that benchmarking safety standards with this data is the real key to reducing risks to workers and equipment.

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How AI makes benchmarking safety standards with near-miss reporting easier

AI Vison technology like Blindsight, helps heavy industry to benchmark safety standards more efficiently by allowing them to view near-miss incidents recorded in real time. Safety personnel are then able to evaluate the near-miss and use this data to benchmark safety standards within the organisation. 

With the help of AI Vison, safety personnel are easily able to identify themes and trends the organisation needs to focus on, improving process safety risk management on their worksite. It allows organisations to focus their efforts on addressing systemic safety gaps rather than treating incidents in isolation.

But not only will safety procedures and processes become more effective, but so will real-time operator alerts. That’s because, once a near-miss recorded by Blindsight is marked as a potentially serious incident, this information is fed back into the algorithm to enable machine learning. Simply put, it means Blindsight is able to keep getting better at picking up near-misses in real time, alerting operators to potentially dangerous scenarios before they happen. 

AI Vision is much more effective than a human spotter alone, picking up things like a person or vehicle in a blindspot. It can do this without requiring any special tags, markers, high-vis clothing, or movement and then is able to record and report the near-miss immediately and without bias.

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AI vision helps safety become a priority

None of us would dispute that safety should always be a top priority in heavy industry. Benchmarking safety standards with near-miss reporting is an essential strategy for continuous improvement made even easier with the integration of AI Vision technology. By automating near-miss reporting, Blindsight allows safety personnel to uncover hidden patterns and enable proactive risk mitigation. Ultimately with the help of AI Vision, heavy industry can create safer work environments and protect the well-being of its workers.

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Book your free demo to see how Blindsight can help bring transparency and improve worksite efficiency and safety for workers.

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