Identify the Influence of Risk Attitude, Work Experience, and Safety Training on Hazard Recognition in Mining
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Identify the Influence of Risk Attitude, Work Experience, and Safety Training on Hazard Recognition in Mining Brianna M. Eiter 1
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Jennica L. Bellanca 2
Received: 29 May 2020 / Accepted: 18 August 2020 # This is a U.S. government work and its text is not subject to copyright protection in the United States; however, its text may be subject to foreign copyright protection 2020
Abstract Mineworkers face a challenging and dynamic work environment every workday. To maintain a safe workplace, mineworkers must be able to recognize worksite hazards while they perform their jobs. Though hazard recognition is a critical skill, recent research from the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) indicates that mineworkers fail to identify a significant number of hazards. To further the understanding of mineworkers’ hazard recognition ability and to begin to address hazard recognition performance, NIOSH researchers analyzed data collected during a laboratory research study to determine the effect of individual mineworker factors including risk attitude, work experience, and safety training on hazard recognition accuracy. The results of this study show that mineworker risk attitude and safety-specific work experience affect hazard recognition performance while hazard-specific safety training does not. These results suggest that some of these individual factors can be overcome through experience and training. Potential strategies that can be used to address these factors are also discussed. Keywords Hazard recognition . Risk tolerance . Experience . Training
1 Introduction From October 2013 through January 2015, the metal/nonmetal (M/NM) mining sector experienced an increase in occupational fatalities. During that time, 38 mineworkers were fatally injured [1], that is twice the number of fatalities that occurred in each of the previous 2 years. The Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) identified inadequate performance on workplace examinations as a contributing factor to these fatalities and issued a program policy letter [2] focused on clarifying the requirements and responsibilities related to workplace examinations. To improve workplace examinations, MSHA approved a new workplace examination rule. Overall, this new workplace examination rule builds on the existing standard by adding the requirement that the exam be done before work begins in a specific area of the workplace and by adding new notification and recordkeeping * Brianna M. Eiter [email protected] 1
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requirements. However, a critical aspect of the workplace examination that is not addressed is guidance related to the “competent person,” which is the person designated by the mine operator to examine the working place for conditions that adversely affect safety and health. Within the Code of Federal Regulations (30 CFR 56.2), the competent person is defined as a person having abilities and experience that fully qualify him or her to perform the duty to which he or she is assigned [2]. In the case of workplace examinations, a competent
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