Sharing is caring and sharing near misses in the tall ships fleet will hopefully improve and sharpen routines and security for the international fleet. By reporting you help everyone to improve.
Purpose:
The general idea of the system is to improve safety at sea by aiding Training Ship operators to share knowledge about near misses.
How does the system work?
All reports are reviewed by the Near Miss group. The most useful of the reports are every three months compiled and published on the STI website. An important part of the form is, that the operator indicates whether the report should be anonymized before being publicized. The anonymized report will be approved by the operator before being put on the website. The operator keeps the ownership of the report and can remove it at any time.
Every year at the STI conference two or three reports which are especially interesting will be presented by the Near Miss
group. Whenever possible the report should be introduced by its author.
The Near Miss group:
The group is a working group operating under the ExCom. The members are appointed every year at the STI conference.
There should be representation from operators as well as mariners in the group.
Overall principles:
• The ownership to the reports and incidents resides and remains at the ship operator.
• Knowledge sharing is voluntary.
• The STI system of Near Miss reporting is based on a no blame approach.
• The Near Miss group, the ExCom and STI encourages reporting of near misses to aid safety at sea.
Why do we make Near Miss reports?
To motivate the filing of reports, it is essential that users know WHY the reports are valuable. And the reasons are:
1) Writing the report prompts the involved persons to reflect on what happened, why it happened and what they can do to prevent a similar situation from re-occurring, and
2) The report becomes even more meaningful when they share their experience, so others also can benefit from the lessons learned.
What is a Near Miss?
A Near Miss is an incident that could have led to an accident (e.g. injury or pollution) under slightly different circumstances.The exact definition is often debated, but the general view is as illustrated below. To keep things simple and to ensure inclusion of all relevant situations, STI recommend that you report the first three categories (i.e. unsafe condition, unsafe act and near miss) and simply call them all Near Miss.
Use of names in the reports
To build confidence in the Near Miss system and to ensure that the crew members feel trust the reporting set-up, we
recommend that the reports do not include names of the persons involved in the incident.
About making a Near Miss rapport
The text should be short, concise and just detailed enough to understand the key elements of the situation. The report
information should – to the extent possible – be clearly split into sections of facts, analysis and conclusion.