Doug Hood Mining

Health and safety through people and systems

April 23, 2015

In April 2015 Doug Hood Mining was recertified to ACC’s Workplace Safety Management Practices (WSMP) standard at tertiary level. We first joined this AS/NZS 4801 based programme in 2002 and achieved tertiary level since 2005.

We’ve learnt a lot about health and safety over the years and will continue to do so. Ultimately we’ve learnt that we only have a moral licence to operate when we operate safely. To ensure this happens we have grown our health and safety culture around the core elements of people and systems.

People
Systems don’t drive dump trucks, people do. This requires competent people who are selected, trained, motivated, supervised, and accepted by their peers. People who learn the company’s cultural identity and values through information.

It is important that the individual and team understand and accept what is required of them including their commitment to and focus on the job to complete the task safely and efficiently.

Training, educating and leading people is an on-going task. The information they will require needs to be developed, controlled, relayed, reviewed and its application checked periodically to embed “how we do things safely around here”. Information such as:

• our history, what we value and why we are the company we are today,
• our application of relevant legislation, regulations and guidelines,
• the minimum standards for new or existing plant and equipment,
• the maximum quantities permitted in a certain hazardous substance store,
• what constitutes reasonable cause to conduct drug and alcohol testing.

Doug Hood Mining ensures this information is retained through:

• a corporate memory, e.g. induction resources, management standards, operating procedures, what worked well, what eliminated or minimised specific hazards, and conversely to avoid the conditions that allowed them to exist, and
• live records, e.g. hazard reports, plant and equipment certifications, audit reports, training events, corrective actions required.

This is where our systems support our people.

Systems
We adopted the ISO 9001 standard as the basis for contract management, building on Transit New Zealand’s TQS1, since 1997, and maintained certification. We develop Contract Management Plans as our interpretation of and recipe for efficiently delivering all client expectations.

We also began to integrate risk management concepts and tools into our project planning and management through both client requirements and our own application of AS/NZS 4360 then AS/NZS 31000 Risk Management standard.

In 2008 we moved from in-house systems to The Vault health and safety management software, initially based on our company server and now web-based, hosted in Christchurch, and backed up to Australia. This allows ready access for up & down-loading current information.

On the operations side we use off-the-shelf and custom applications for estimating, management of production data and project accounting. For plant management we also utilise off-the-shelf and custom applications for cost control, repairs and maintenance, and availability.

We believe that Doug Hood Mining through its people and systems is well positioned to deliver stakeholder expectations and requirements safely in a challenging industry. This belief is summed up well by an excerpt from the foreword to the MBIE booklet People Come First – Building a strong health and safety culture in New Zealand mines, quarries and tunnels:

“Your mindset and understanding of the work will help create the conditions for the work to be carried out safely. Your constant attention to risk will ensure that you are never complacent and always alert to incidents that could happen and improvements that could be made to make your workplace safer”.