Safety Maturity Models for supporting Near Miss Management Systems in Industrial Sector

Maturity models are becoming increasingly popular nowadays as an assessment and improvement tool in several industrial fields. These models are often developed and adopted for supporting process improvement by identifying their current maturity level and in identifying the most critical process to focus on for improving performance of the specific strategy/process. Some examples have been also defined in the safety field by focusing on evaluating safety culture of an enterprise and/or an organization. The scientific literature presents several Safety Culture Maturity Models (SCMMs) developed over the years, although many of them still have gaps in terms of tools for quantitatively measuring the level of maturity of an organization’s safety culture. One of the several elements and indicators considered in these SCMMs is the near miss management process, as it’s generally recognized as a critical aspect for evaluating the maturity level of the safety culture characterizing an organization. Thus, after evaluating how SCMMs have been proposed in the current literature, this study aims to provide a first draft proposal of Near Miss Maturity Model, to support specifically companies in evaluating how their near mis management process is developed and how it could be improved. The purpose is to design a tool able to highlight potential gaps and weaknesses that could be improved for increasing the safety culture of an organization. Safety culture strategies, like Safety I, Safety II and Safety-III, were applied to develop this innovative tool.