Safety Culture and Resilience Engineering: Theory and Application in Improving Gold Mining safety (original) (raw)
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Safety Science, 2019
A mature safety culture is regarded as an important means of ensuring good safety performance, particularly in reducing accidents. However, there is little empirical evidence in the literature that links safety culture maturity with actual safety performance metric. In this study, a safety culture maturity framework was used to examine the safety culture maturity level of mines in Ghana, and to explore the relationship of cultural maturity with accident rates. The safety culture maturity framework used consisted of 3 person and 10 system elements across five levels of culture maturity. A survey comprising the 13 elements was conducted among 828 employees of four large-scale gold mines in Ghana. Through principal component analysis, the structure of the framework was found valid and produced a good fit after testing the model through confirmatory factor analysis. One-way ANOVA showed that the mines had statistically significant differences in their mean incidence rate and pairwise comparison test revealed specific statistically significant mines. Similarly, Kruskal-Wallis H test also showed that the mines' safety culture maturity scores differed significantly from each other and a pairwise test identified specific mines with significant differences. It was found that mines with lower incidence rates consistently had higher safety culture maturity scores for the elements than mines with higher incidence rate. Also, correlation analysis indicated a strong negative correlation between the incidence rate and most elements of the safety culture maturity framework. The model/framework used was found useful and practical to both employees and management, enabling the identification of weak areas that require improvements interventions.
Organizational resilience process: integrated model of safety culture
Organization Management Journal, 2021
Purpose The purpose of the study is to create substantial awareness for safety precautions and safety parameters to lessen occupational injuries and accidents. Utilization of safety culture phenomenon with its fundamental understanding has imperative consideration for safety compliance and participation behaviors. Thoughtful aim of this study is the extension of knowledge related to safety orientation particularly in primary health-care workforce. Design/methodology/approach Only slips and trips accounted for 40% of workplace injuries in nursing professionals. To identity, the data were collected through structured surveys from nursing professionals of public and private hospitals in Pakistan. To evaluate that data for current study, standardized regression coefficients (parameter estimation) with 95% confidence interval and 5,000 bootstrap samples were subjected. Confirmatory factor analysis was also used to measure the validity of study constructs. Findings The potential findings ...
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.
Open Journal of Safety Science and Technology, 2017
This paper reviews the literature on resilience engineering as a safety management approach. Preferred Reporting Items for Reporting Systematic Reviews guidelines were used to search, select and evaluate 46 published works. The terms organisational resilience and resilience engineering are clarified, and functionalist and interpretive research frameworks used to analyze articles. This review suggests there is no universally agreed definition of resilience engineering; but it involves a collective aspect, is multifactorial, multilevel and multidimensional; associated with four key principles (anticipation, response, learning and monitoring) and successful outcomes. The gap between work as imagined and work as performed is an important aspect. Studies on resilience engineering have predominantly involved qualitative investigations; with data collected through site observations, safety audits and surveys. Eight research gaps were identified, and suggestions made on how these gaps can be addressed through empirical research.
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...
On the rationale of resilience in the domain of safety: A literature review
Reliability Engineering & System Safety, 2015
Resilience is becoming a prevalent agenda in safety research and organisational practice. In this study we examine how the peer-reviewed safety science literature (a) formulates the rationale behind the study of resilience; (b) constructs resilience as a scientific object; and (c) constructs and locates the resilient subject. The results suggest that resilience engineering scholars typically motivate the need for their studies by referring to the inherent complexities of modern sociotechnical systems; complexities that make these systems inherently risky. The object of resilience then becomes the capacity to adapt to such emerging risks in order to guarantee the success of the inherently risky system. In the material reviewed, the subject of resilience is typically the individual, either at the sharp end or at higher managerial levels. The individual is called-upon to adapt in the face of risk to secure the continuous performance of the system. Based on the results from how resilience has been introduced in safety sciences we raise three ethical questions for the field to address: (1) should resilience be seen as people thriving despite of, or because of, risk?; (2) should resilience theory form a basis for moral judgement?; and finally (3) how much should resilience be approached as a trait of the individual?
Safety Culture: A Retrospective Analysis of Occupational Health and Safety Mining Reports
Safety and Health at Work, 2021
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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.
Applied Sciences, 2020
Safety culture is the result of values, attitudes, and perceptions of the members of an organization that prioritize safety over competing goals. Previous research has shown the impact that organizational aspects can have in safety performance. Under the prism of the theoretical approaches from the high reliability organizations theory (HROT), resilience engineering (RE), and conflicting objectives perspective, this study was aimed at describing the overall main safety culture traits of the Spanish nuclear power plants, as well as identifying particularities associated with subcultures. For this purpose, a statistical analysis of safety culture surveys and behavioral anchored rating scales (BARS), handed over to all the operating Spanish nuclear power plants, was carried out. Results reveal that safety is a recognized value that prevails over production, there is a high degree of standardization, power plants are better prepared to organize plans and strategies than to adapt and cop...