The ones that didn't hurt anyone.
A near miss is the cheapest lesson your safety program will ever get. EHSTEC captures close calls from the field, investigates them at a weight that matches the risk, and drives each one to a verified fix.
A near miss is an event, not a condition
A near miss is something that happened — a load shifted, a plank gave way, a reversing truck stopped short — where the only reason nobody was hurt was timing or luck. The sequence was real. The outcome was not.
That is what separates it from a hazard report, which describes a condition or an act that could cause harm but has not yet produced an event. Both are worth capturing, and in EHSTEC both can start from the same field report — but they take different routes afterwards, because a near miss is investigated like an incident and a hazard is triaged and fixed. If what you saw is a condition rather than an event, hazard reporting is the workflow you want.
Near misses matter because they are the only events that describe a real failure sequence without costing anyone an injury. They are counted as a leading indicator — a measure of what your program is catching — rather than a lagging one. EHSTEC treats them accordingly: a near miss is a first-class case type in the incident register, and it is deliberately excluded from your OSHA recordable and DART figures.
Low friction, or it does not get reported
- A built-in Near-Miss / Hazard Report template asks only what matters: date observed, location, what happened, and a photo.
- One question sets the type — near miss, unsafe condition, unsafe act or property damage — so the report is routed on the reporter's own words, not an administrator's guess.
- Potential severity is captured at the point of reporting, while the person who saw it still remembers how close it was.
- Reporting runs in the browser, so there is no app to install before somebody can file the first one.
An investigation sized to what actually happened
- A near-miss case asks for the event, the root cause and the contributing factors — the unsafe act or unsafe condition behind it.
- It does not ask for the medical detail, days-away figures or OSHA classification an injury case requires, so the checklist stays proportionate.
- The case shows its own next step, so an investigation never stalls because nobody knew what was outstanding.
- Everything is recorded against the case, giving you the trail if a similar event happens later.
A report that ends in a fix, not a filing cabinet
- Any near-miss case can raise a corrective action that carries a link back to the case it came from.
- The action gets an owner, a due date and evidence on close, and the case is not finished while it is open.
- Near misses sit in the same register as injuries, so you can see the ratio between what you caught and what you did not.
- Because they are excluded from recordable and DART counts, reporting more of them never inflates your injury rates — which is what makes it safe to encourage reporting.
Where near-miss reporting connects
Guides on near-miss reporting
Make the close calls count
Start a free trial and turn near-miss reports into investigations, actions and a leading indicator you can actually trend.