Risk assessment: An opportunity to change health and safety performance

A common theme running through recently introduced mining health and safety legislation in many parts of the world is risk assessment. Most recently, risk assessment legislation has been introduced across the mining industry of South Africa and the view that the introduction of risk assessment based legislation provides an ideal opportunity to improve on past health and sa fety performance is presented. Risk assessment techniques range from highly complex safely system techniqu es that are used in high technology process industries, to subjective techn iques based on simple judgements that are finding use in many other industr ies. The objective of this paper is to shed some light on risk assessment, not by detailing the risk assessment process but by identifying the crucial elements that need to be considered if risk assessments are to be successf ul in changing health and safety performance. A case study is presented illustrating the introduction of risk assessment into the Ingwe Coal Corporation, one of South Africa's largest mining house s, to indicate how the system was developed and how it is being used.