Investigating the Status of near Miss Reporting and its Relation to Safety climate in East Azerbaijan Gas Company

Abstract

Introduction: In recent years, the perspective of large organizations and companies in order to prevent occupational accidents and diseases has changed. Organization changed their ways of assessing their safety performance. They used leading indicators instead of lagging indicators. Two of these indicators are accident precursor reporting and safety climate. Methods: This study was conducted in two stage: quantitative and qualitative. In the qualitative study section, the state of the reporting process of the gas company was investigated using field observations and review of documents. The reasons for non-reporting of accident precursor were investigated from the perspective of HSE officers of the East Azerbaijan Gas Company by using the semi-structured interview method. In the quantitative part of the research, the safety climate of the company was investigated by using the safety climate questionnaire and the safety climate of different areas has been determined. Also, the relationship between safety climate and near miss reporting was investigated using Pearson test. Results: In this section, all report information was placed in three clusters of near miss (with 8 categories and 996 codes), unsafe acts (with 6 categories and 447 codes) and unsafe conditions (with 9 categories and 828 codes). Then, for a more detailed study, the required information was investigating statistically. In a quantitative part of the research, the safety climate of the company was studied using a safety climate questionnaire. The overall average safety climate of the company is 1.74 (34/0). Area 5 has the highest average score of safety climate (1.86) and area 3 has the lowest average score of safety climate (1.69).Discussion: The reason for the lack of correlation between the reporting of accident predictors and safety atmosphere in this study could be the flaw of the reporting system in the company, because the study found that this system has many defects, which prevent people from reporting. Also, the study of safety climate showed that some areas have low safety climate. Low safety climate indicates that it is necessary to plan and implement intervention measures by the company.