ASTM F3256-25

1.1 This guide covers near-miss event criteria to include unsafe acts, unsafe conditions, or negative business impacts for application in the maritime industry by individual organizations or companies to improve their health, safety, security, and environmental (HSSE) management as well as to protect against negative business impacts.

1.2 The purpose of this guide is to support companies, organizations, workforce, and safety professionals in collecting, recording, reporting, analyzing, and benchmarking near-miss events that can be leveraged for identifying and reducing safety risks in the maritime industry. This includes strengthening mandatory and non-mandatory safety management systems (SMS) plus other organized quality management systems used by industry to improve pre-cursor HSSE data collection, sharing, and benchmarking to reduce risk.

1.3 In addition, this guide serves to improve standardization of terminology, definitions, data collection and reporting methodologies, and analytics to promote HSSE data and information sharing within companies, organizations, and researchers throughout the maritime industry.

1.4 The criteria contained within this guide should be applied to manage near-miss events for the recording, reporting, and data analysis in the maritime industry unless otherwise specified.

1.5 This standard does not purport to address all of the safety concerns, if any, associated with its use. It is the responsibility of the user of this standard to establish appropriate safety, health, and environmental practices and determine the applicability of regulatory limitations prior to use.

1.6 This international standard was developed in accordance with internationally recognized principles on standardization established in the Decision on Principles for the Development of International Standards, Guides and Recommendations issued by the World Trade Organization Technical Barriers to Trade (TBT) Committee.