By John H. Russ
The National Firefighter Near Miss Reporting System is an essential part of your department’s safety and risk management initiative. Developed in 2005, the program was launched as a means to record and share events that had the potential to result in fire equipment damage, serious firefighter injury, or even a line-of-duty death (LODD). The National Firefighter Near Miss Program’s mission is to reduce firefighter and emergency medical service (EMS) provider injury and death by helping the fire service apply the lessons learned from local near misses on a global scale.
The concept of learning from near misses started in the 1930s, when industrial safety engineers found that for every incident involving a fatality, a major accident, or a serious injury, there were 29 incidents that caused minor injuries. They also discovered there were more than 300 incidences of the same event in which no injuries occurred at all because of a fortunate break in the chain of events. Later, it was determined that if they concentrated on extracting lessons from these 300 events, potentially, they could mitigate and even avoid the 29 minor injuries or the one catastrophic event.
If you are a current subscriber,login hereto access this content.
If you would like to become a subscriber, please visit ushere.
