The definition
Article 4 of the Turkish OHS Risk Assessment Regulation defines a near miss as an event occurring at the workplace that has the potential to harm the worker, the workplace or work equipment but does not actually harm them. What decides the classification is the potential, not the outcome: even if nobody was hurt and no equipment was damaged, the event is a near miss.
How it differs from an accident at work
Under Article 3 of Law No. 6331, an accident at work is an event occurring at the workplace or because of the conduct of the work that causes death or renders the body physically or mentally disabled. In a near miss none of those consequences happened; the last link of the chain was missing, so no loss occurred. That is why a near-miss record reads like an accident report whose price has not yet been paid.
The employer's duty
Article 14(1)(b) of Law No. 6331 requires the employer to investigate events that did not cause injury or death but damaged the workplace or work equipment, or had the potential to do so, and to draw up reports on them. Unlike an accident at work there is no three-working-day notification to the social security institution; the duty is to investigate and to record. Near-miss records are also listed among the inputs of the risk assessment, and the occurrence of an accident, an occupational disease or a near miss is one of the situations that require the risk assessment to be renewed.
Why it is worth recording
Accident counts are a lagging indicator: they are measured after the event. A near miss shows the gap in the control layer before anyone is harmed. British process safety guidance makes the same point when it treats incidents that did not end in injury or environmental damage as evidence of a failing barrier. For the record to be useful three things are needed: reporting must be easy, the event must be investigated down to its cause, and the closure of the action must be tracked.
Where this sits in Optifora
Near misses, unsafe conditions, accidents at work and occupational diseases belong to the "Incident and non-conformity" module. That module has not been written yet; it appears on the roadmap in the module catalogue, and the status labels there come from the product's own inventory. For the term and its neighbours, see the OHS glossary.