Description

Across the global mining industry, safety and health management systems (SHMS) are the dominant tool utilized to improve occupational and process safety performance. This development has occurred over 40 years and has been informed by national regulation requirements (i.e., almost every country wherein mining is a primary industry), academic research (i.e., multiple safety models and thousands of publications), ISO consensus standards (e.g., 45001, etc.), NGO systems criteria (e.g., IRM), trade association requirements (e.g., TSM, CMSI, etc.), and mining company experience and trends (e.g., management system integration). Despite decades of use and refinement, there is no consensus regarding the optimal SHMS design even as there is broad acknowledgment of the large number of socio-technical variables involved in incident causation and related risk management controls. This is a critical industry blind spot that undermines social license to operate and Vision Zero outcomes. How effective are SHMSs? How can they be optimized? Should design be standardized for the benefit of comparison or customized to leverage flexibility?

Whole System Safety is a design framework to optimize the structure, implementation, integration and assurance of SHMSs. It is based on systems thinking, complexity minimization, long-term sustainability practices, and incorporates research findings on SHMS effectiveness. While applied to safety and health in this context, the whole systems philosophy is relevant to any management system applications, e.g., environment, risk, quality, ESG, operations, etc. This presentation summarizes the Whole Systems Safety rationale, principles, practices and highlights related operator case studies.