Volume 6, Issue 30 of Aviation Human Factors Industry News focuses on near miss reporting. The importance of near miss reporting, as well as the important role supervisors play in encouraging workers to report near misses, is something that most companies understand, but often struggle with in practice. Why report near misses?
- It enables companies to pro-actively resolve hazards before a tragic or costly incident occurs.
- It engages the workforce (all workers at all levels) in solving problems.
- It increases safety ownership and reinforces workers’ self-esteem.
- It exposes valuable information that otherwise might not be discussed.
- It develops a positive and necessary attitude surrounding safety.
Supervisors have an important role to play in encouraging workers to report near misses by consistently requiring them to do so, broadening the meaning of incidents to include near misses, acting on the information workers have given, and making it easy for workers to report near misses, to name just a few methods of doing so.
Issue 30 also looks at a study on fatigue published in the journal Sleep which suggests that adults can recover their sleep debt effectively by sleeping longer at the weekend. In the study, participants were only allowed to sleep 4 hours for 5 nights, recovering by sleeping 10 hours at the weekend (although full recovery may require extra sleep for several more days).
EI HOF Blog 