From our Ore to Your Door - Episode 9 - Health & Safety

It is common to think of safety as a component of business, like production or maintenance. At QMAG we propose another way of seeing safety. Safety is not a component of our business, rather safety is an outcome of business. Safety performance comes from the effectiveness of our internal systems and processes. It comes from the quality and maintenance of our plant and equipment.

Safety performance also comes from the effectiveness of our leadership, the effectiveness of our communication and all the human interactions in our business. It is a result of the effectiveness of people interacting in the work environment. Everything that happens in our business combines to give us our safety performance.

Due to our workforce size, the complexity of our workplaces and applicable governance, placing an emphasis on our people’s safety and health is the most important aspect for QMAG. We achieve this through several approaches, with the critical principles being used from the Safety Culture Model - safe people, safe environment, and safe practices.

We maintain this focus through the application of the QMAG risk management framework. At each business level we strive to apply these principles through identifying risks, determining suitable control strategies and prioritizing their effective implementation. This is performed in our business baseline risk assessment to minimize risks to a safe acceptable level through the implementation of preventative control measures before mitigation controls.

With a commitment to continuous improvement we have recently focused on leadership and culture through the implementation of a safety leadership program (ZIP). The purpose of which is to prevent incidents and injury as well as to empower our people to understand their thinking and decisions around safety. This is to ensure we view safety as something we want to do rather than what we need to do, i.e. safety as a currency and not as a cost. Every person that works on a QMAG site has the right to go home safely in the same condition they came to work.