Our company’s goal has been to build upon our existing risk assessment and employee consultation processes (using the Dupont model of improving safe behaviour through involvement) to achieve greater control over occupational risk. The end result is uSafe: Maxam’s Safety Management System.

uSafe is the process of:

• Identifying hazards
• Assessing Risk
• Treating the risk (or controlling the risk)
• Documenting risk treatments in minimal acceptable standards (safe operating procedures)
• Training staff
• Auditing compliance, and
• Continually improving

Maxam’s approach to managing safety is based on the principal that a management system must be consistent with the objectives and detail of enabling legislation, such as the various Occupational Health and Safety Acts and be compliant with prescriptive legislation such as Explosives Regulations. Every person within the company must be provided with an avenue for actively participating in hazard identification and risk assessment. Following the model mentioned above, we reviewed all of our documentation relating to the delivery of explosive services to ensure that our existing risk management practices and documentation reflected the occupational hazards faced by our employees and clients. We evaluated our methods of risk management to ensure that they reflected the best available within our industry.

After setting the context under which the review would be conducted, a six-step process was followed, as described below:

1. Hazard identification

   Employees were provided with a forum in which to “brainstorm” and develop a list of all occupational hazards particular to the delivery of Maxam services. These sessions generated a simple listing of distinct hazards covering topics ranging from the transport and delivery of explosives and product safety to human behavioural characteristics and physical hazards (such as working at heights, exposure to open edges on benches and fitness for work).

2. Risk categorisation and assessment

   Each hazard was placed into one of three categories (see Figure 1). The risk potential of every identified hazard was assessed using a semi-qualitative assessment tool (5 x 7matrixes).All risks were ranked based on the risk score derived from the perceived Consequence, Exposure and Probability of the risk event occurring. Measurements ranged from Very High (e.g. exposure to open edges on a shot bench, or explosive pump malfunction) to Very Low (excessive exposure to UV radiation, sunlight and minor slips, trips and falls).

3. Risk treatments and controls

   Nearly all of the identified risks were subject to existing control measures, such as the use of fall prevention or protection equipment and explosive pump planned maintenance schedules. Following the “hierarchy of controls approach,” existing risk treatments were categorised into either hard or soft controls, soft controls essentially being those at the bottom of the hierarchy (administrative and personal protective equipment) and hard controls being those toward the top of the hierarchy (physical barriers such as guards rails on ISO containers or PDO interlocks on trucks).Where possible, both a hard and soft risk control was allocated to all medium to high-risk events.

4. Setting minimal acceptable standards

   Our safety management system documentation (every company standard and operating procedure) was reviewed, and where necessary, amended or re-written to reflect the revised risk potential and method of risk treatment. In order to ensure that, as a minimal, uSafe complied with the various state statutory requirements, a "statutory compliance matrix" was developed, comparing uSafe documentation against the various state legislative requirements. The uSafe documentation was approved by the Maxam Management team and released as a “Controlled Document.”

5. Retraining

   Maxam conducts annual re-induction training for all employees. This year the induction focused on the changes to our Safety Management System and the implementation of uSafe. The Maxam employee handbook was re-written to reflect the changes to our documentation and our internal training modules revised to refer to relevant uSafe requirements.

6. Compliance auditing

   All Maxam depots and branches are subject to two uSafe audits annually. The audits are a detailed quantitative assessment where each branch receives a score out of a possible 500points. This type of assessment provides Maxam management with an accurate positive performance indicator of safety effort, as opposed to the outcome based assessment of injury frequency rate.

7. Continually improving

   The implementation of remedial actions from compliance auditing completes the management cycle of Plan, Do, Check and Act, (the uSafe process). The measurement of close out times for high-risk HIAS (Hazard, Incident, Accident, and Suggestion) reports and the effectiveness of risk treatments provide us with positive performance indicators for the measurement of improvement.

What we learnt

During the revision process, every employee within Maxam was provided with a forum to contribute; all ideas and suggestions were included. This process reinforced that the most powerful risk management tool within our group is our employees. If a safety management system is to be effective it must be “owned” by our employees and actively supported by management. uSafe empowers everybody within the company to take an active role in reducing occupational risk by fostering a philosophy of improvement through ownership and accountability. The risk assessment model adopted by Maxam follows that in Australian Standard 4360.

Summary

Good safety management practices need not be complex, the basic principals of occupational risk reduction have not changed: Companies who can successfully identify, evaluate and control hazards, will be those with the better safety performance. At Maxam the basic principals are evident in all aspects of our safety management system, uSafe. Maxam’s commitment to our staff and clients is to continuously improve these services through actively seeking and nurturing initiative in all aspects of our operations.