Addressing the cultural complexity of OHS in the Australian mining industry (original) (raw)
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Safety Culture: A Retrospective Analysis of Occupational Health and Safety Mining Reports
Safety and Health at Work, 2021
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Diversity of Research in Health Journal, 2017
The purpose of this research was to review the commissioned occupational health and safety (OHS) reports in mining, over the past 50 years, in a two-step approach. The objective of the initial phase was to determine if there were any recommendations that were stated in more than one of the evaluated commissioned reports, that spanned the 50-year timeframe. The reports were selected through a review of the literature and in consultation with experts in OHS and mining. A multi-stage analysis was conducted on the recommendations, and identified 6 overlapping themes, and 49 sets of specific overlaps. In the second phase, a seeded analysis using a qualitative data analysis software, was completed to understand how safety culture was discussed in the reports. This was accomplished by completing a review of the literature to define safety culture, and to build the dictionary, which was seeded into the software. The analysis highlighted the use of various terms for safety culture throughout the 50-year history, with a particular emphasis on the fact that the term safety culture was not directly referenced in the selected reports until 1997.
2018
Human behaviour is strongly influenced by the culture they live in. Therefore, if safety is a priority in a company’s culture and this norm is internalized by every member of this organization, elimination of all types of unsafe behaviour would be possible. This aspect of organizational culture is called safety culture. In order to evaluate the safety culture in an organization, one of the useful tools is application of a safety culture survey. Application of a safety culture survey among a company’s workers and managers would supply the management with valuable data concerning the safety culture perception of the organization members. Thus, the results from analyses of this data including the demographical features of the organization members would help the managers and OHS professionals design more effective activities to prevent workplace accidents. This paper aims at explaining the importance of safety culture and its contribution to OHS efforts. An empirical study applied at a ...
Journal of The South African Institute of Mining and Metallurgy, 2015
responsibilities, which include a biennial review of health and safety. The review takes the form of a convention called the Mine Health and Safety Summit. At the Summit of 2003, the tripartite partners agreed to establish targets for health and safety, and intermediate milestones for the period 2003 to 2013 (DMR, 2013) (Table I). The 2010 Summit launched a framework that included guiding principles, commitments and action points, to shift health and safety culture, referred to in the sector as the Culture Transformation Framework. As seen in Table I, the goals for 2013 involved reducing the number of fatalities to levels attained by the mining sectors of Australia, the USA, and the Ontario province of Canada; and from 2013 onwards, eliminating new cases of silicosis and noise-induced hearing loss. The attainment of these milestones represented a considerable challenge. Before MOSH began piloting leading practices to address health and safety challenges in 2008, the sector relied solely on the individual efforts of mining companies to achieve the milestones. MOSH represented a shift to collective and informed effort, active promotion of promising interventions, and engagement of the entire sector, across all commodities and all regions of the country.
The daily operations in the mining industry are still a significant source of risk with regard to occupational safety and health (OS & H). Various research studies and statistical data worldwide show that the number of serious injuries and fatalities still remains high despite substantial efforts the industry has put in recent years in decreasing those numbers. This paper argues that the next level of safety performance will have to consider a transition from coping solely with workplace dangers, to a more sys-temic model taking organizational risks in consideration. In this aspect, lessons learned from the nuclear industry may be useful, as organizational learning processes are believed to be more universal than the technologies in which they are used. With the notable exception of major accidents, organizational performance has not received all the attention it deserves. A key element for reaching the next level of performance is to include organizational factors in low level events analyses, and approach the management as a risk control system. These factors will then appear not only in the event analysis, but in supervision activities, audits, change management and the like. Many recent event analyses across various industries have shown that organizational factors play a key role in creating conditions for triggering major accidents (aviation, railway transportation, nuclear industry, oil exploitation, mining, etc.). In this paper, a perspective that may be used in supervisory activities, self-assessments and minor events investigations, is presented. When ingrained in an organizational culture, such perspective has the highest potential for continuous safety improvement.
9th Research in Engineering Education Symposium (REES 2021) and 32nd Australasian Association for Engineering Education Conference (REES AAEE 2021), 2022
After several high-profile accidents in the late 20 th century, there was an increased effort to focus on safety within Engineering. This is now known as Safety Culture, and it has become a priority for many Australian mining companies. Most previous literature about safety culture is mainly focused on a company perspective instead of an individual one. Additionally, there is little research on an individual's development of safety culture. This study is building on the Engineering Research project "Investigating Safety Culture and Engineering Professional Identity in the Oil and Gas Industry" by Payne (2020) which started to investigate these issues.
Assessment of Safety Culture and Maturity in Mining Environments: Case of Njuli Quarry
2020
Due to an ever increasing concern for safety at most mines in Malawi, this paper aimed at assessing the safety culture and maturity in mining environments by applying the Safety Culture Maturity Model (SCMM). The SCMM is a practical and reliable diagnostic tool to use in the context of Malawian mining environments because it emphasizes the importance of employee involvement in assessing and improving safety culture. Njuli quarry is used as a case study due to its adoption of modern mining technologies and long existence in the mining industry. The methods used to assess the level of maturity of safety culture comprised questionnaires, interviews and behavioral observations. To test the reliability of the questionnaire, the respondents were interviewed using the same questions and comparing the results. There was good reliability of the measures used since the correlation coefficients between questionnaire and interview ranged from r = 0.9 to 1. The results demonstrate that Njuli qua...
Safety culture maturity assessment for mining activities in South America
BACKGROUND: Health and safety is a crucial issue in the mining industry due to the implication of accidents in the sector. OBJECTIVE: This study determines the safety culture characteristics in several mining activities from South America. METHODS: A survey of the safety culture maturity has been done by means of 24 questions regarding the type of activity, number of employees and safety culture characteristics of the activity: information of accidents and incidents, organizational structure to deal with information, involvement of the company in health and safety issues, the way it communicates accidents and incidents and commitment of the company towards health and safety. RESULTS: The questionnaire was completed by 62 managers from Bolivia, Peru and Colombia. Results show different behaviors depending on the type of company, Artisanal or Large-Scale Mines, ASM and LSM respectively. LSM show a level of maturity according to the size of the company, while ASM does not have a clear trend in terms of size, even though there is a relationship between employees and safety culture maturity. In addition, a remarkable difference can be seen between activities with and without continuous improvement systems implemented. CONCLUSIONS: Large scale mining improves their level of safety culture as the size of the company increases, because procedures and control systems are implemented. Cooperatives or small companies also achieve substantial gains when they introduce similar systems.
Safety Culture and Resilience Engineering: Theory and Application in Improving Gold Mining safety
Contemporary approaches to safety management appear to be failing short of meeting its mark in improving mine safety. This is evidenced by the high workers compensation, high incidence rates and fatalities. Evidence from high-risk and complex organisations points towards safety culture as being important in improving site safety. In more recent years resilience engineering has been touted as a new and innovative way of managing safety. This paper reviews and synthesises previous literature on safety culture and resilience engineering. It then highlights methods that can be used to measure safety culture and resilience engineering, and explores similarities and differences between complex organisations and gold mining to identify opportunities for more innovative approaches to improving safety in gold mining operations through safety culture and resilience engineering.
Understanding and assessing safety culture
Journal of Radiological Protection, 1997
The `Dalling' integrated model of organisational performance is introduced and described. A principal element of this model is culture, which is dynamically contrasted with the five other interacting critical elements, which comprise: the management system, the knowledge base, corporate leadership, stakeholders and consciousness. All six of these principal driving elements significantly influence health, safety, environmental, security, or any other aspect of organisational performance. It is asserted that the elements of organisational performance must be clearly defined and understood if meaningful measurements are to be carried out and sustained progress made in improving the knowledge of organisational performance. AEA Technology's safety culture research programme is then described together with the application of a safety culture assessment tool to organisations in the nuclear, electricity, transport, and oil and gas industries, both within and outside of the United Kingdom.