The International Mining Safety Hub (IMS Hub) is now live. Founding partners Anglo American, AngloGold Ashanti, Harmony Gold, Impala Platinum, Sibanye-Stillwater, Teck Resources and the Minerals Council South Africa have come together to achieve the common goal of reducing fatalities and serious incidents in mining.
The IMS Hub, powered by Jincom – a global visual health and safety communication specialist agency – is an online hub of industry-endorsed visual safety tools which allow for greater learning opportunities and improve safety for all levels of employees.
Each founding partner contributes 2 suites of materials around key fatal or catastrophic risks at their operations. Once transformed into simplified visual tools, these tools are shared on the hub for the use and adaptation of all other partners. The spirit of the IMS Hub is shared value aimed at making the mining industry safer, and partners only need to contribute information in order to participate.
Founding partners are encouraging other mining operations to join in and contribute valuable knowledge on the fatal hazard themes they would specialise in based on their operation.
George Coetzee, Group Safety VP at AngloGold Ashanti emphasised the need for the hub to develop the industry further, “some companies have progressed further in their safety journeys and bring maturity and learning from those journeys. This allows those companies, still in the early stages of the journey, to tap into the lessons learnt and wealth of knowledge gained. Ultimately, we will all gain from this in our ultimate goal of working places free from injury and harm.”
Mark Robins, Lead – Operational Risk Management at Anglo American emphasises “We are proud to be a founding partner as we believe in leveraging the excellent work of member organisations, this is a mining-led initiative that adopts the ICMM’s Critical Control methodology and is based upon broad experience and learnings from incidents. We believe that the hub will greatly assist all of us involved in mining to achieve the goal of Zero Fatalities and ultimately Zero Harm.”
The tools being developed include:
Highly visual operator-focused safety standards are taken from complex technical documents and transformed into technically-accurate illustrations and infographics which improve understanding, help workers to retain information better and breakthrough language and literacy barriers
Critical Controls state the most important preventative and mitigative controls most critical to saving lives and include the associated risk bowties in only a couple of pages
Control Checklists target all levels of an organisation with specifically illustrated checklists for managers, supervisors and operators to review each critical control, perform tasks safely and managing all risks involved every step of the way. These can be downloaded as ‘text’ files to be used in mobile device auditing applications
Toolbox Talks for supervisors reinforces Critical Controls, a visual toolbox facilitating two-way engagement with workers and refreshing supervisor understanding, posters are also made available for the workspace
Learning from Incidents (LFI) include Lesson Learned Summary Incident Reports with 3D animations that focus on the cause and learnings as well as review the effectiveness of the relevant controls
Virtual Reality content will be an exciting addition to the IMS Hub further down the line as well as e-learning courses created from repurposed content
The founding partners have played a significant role in developing the content for the initial launch which includes fatal hazard themes relating to FOG, Light and heavy vehicle interaction, underground fires, cranes and lifting, member LFI submissions with more added by all companies involved.
“The IMS Hub goes the extra mile by portraying the themes and standards as easy to understand visuals, safety is the top priority for all industry leaders in mining, having simple visual information on hand goes a long way in ensuring all employees on the ground know how to keep themselves safe”, says Pieter Bezuidenhout, Acting Safety and Technology Executive at Harmony Gold.
The International Mining Safety Hub supplies tools which are best-in-class and aligned to evolving legislation requirements. It creates a space of learning where the mining industry is challenged to do better and work together to achieve Zero Harm. The Hub is user friendly and secure and the number of partners is limitless.
Leigh McMaster, Principal Specialist: Safety & Behaviour at the Minerals Council South Africa notes, “the value derived from this unique industry collaboration will undoubtedly add value to individual companies and the collective industry in identifying critical controls and supporting processes to prevent material unwanted events. New members to the Hub effectively get a tenfold return on investment by virtue of accessing all content developed by existing members.”
https://www.miningreview.com/coal/the-international-mining-safety-hub-launched/
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