Reset the Near Miss

A few years ago, the IAFC put forth a new initiative designed to turn some near-miss situations into learning experiences for various fire departments around the country and the world to better protect all firefighters. The Near Miss program was intended to create valuable lessons for all firefighters to find ways to improve training, protocols and even technologies so that one fire crew's near-miss experience will protect hundreds or thousands of other lives later from the breakthroughs developed.

Various departments in the last near-decade have submitted more than 5,000 near-miss reports into the initiative, and the program has produced a "Report of the Week" feature that provided some good tools for various fire departments to evaluate what they do and address changes they deem necessary.

The IAFC just recently announced an upgrade to the program - let's call it New Miss 2.0 - that takes all the reports and produces learning tools that take the data and lessons to an entirely different plateau. Now, with a new platform called XCapture - which uses technology developed by the U.S. Department of Defense - that will allow for future near-miss reports to be more complete and be submitted in such a way that the reports can be applied more directly and practically to serve as their own catalysts for change in various fire departments.

The new system provides a structured interview process that will gear prompts to answers to the interview questions. The questions gather data from the answers to help gather decision-making data points, and then creates a timeline of events to show possible cause-and-effect relationships in the near-miss incident, which may provide some clarity into the situation and provide tools for correction actions to potentially avoid the same situation in the future.

To learn more about the New Miss program, click here.