Using Near Miss Reporting to Enhance Safety Performance

The construction industry continues to rank as one of the most dangerous work environments when compared to other industrial sectors in the U.S. Construction companies are required to record lagging safety leading indicators which include fatalities, injuries, and illnesses. Safety leading indicators provide an opportunity to identify construction site hazards and hazardous worker behavior before a fatality, injury, or illness occurs.

The Construction Industry Institute (CII) is one of the leading organizations sponsoring and conducting research to improve construction safety and health. CII has completed a multitude of research that addresses problems and identifies potential solutions for safety in the construction industry. Safety and health research proposed by CII often builds off previous completed research projects. The interest and motivation for the research detailed in this report by RT 301 originated from research findings of RT 284 which mainly focused on active safety leading indicators for monitoring the overall safety of a construction project (CII 2012). In fact, the research discussed in this report builds largely on previous CII research.

Most recently, CII members have indicated a particular interest in pro-active safety, specifically using safety leading indicators as an additional metric to assess worker safety performance. The research presented in this report along with previous CII research ventures explore pro-active safety and specifically safety leading indicators. Much of the safety and health research completed by CII has been implemented successfully by construction companies and project owners.