Objective: To improve mining safety and health training in the western United States to support efforts to reduce mining injuries, illnesses and fatalities. Background: Despite continued improvements over time, mining injuries and fatalities continue to occur in the mining industry, and reducing occupational illnesses remains challenging. Building on our past NIOSH miner training (U60) grants, we will use a competency- based framework to integrate health and safety training for miners, trainers, and managers.
Specific Aims : 1) Offer active learning-based safety and health training to mine workers; 2) Offer innovative train-the-trainer programs; and 3) Establish collaborative partnerships for critical control management. Study Design: we will use a competency-based framework with five levels. Level 1 will provide knowledge needed for new miners as part of new miner training and short pre-shift training. Level 2 will provide knowledge for more experienced miners during annual refresher training. Level 3 is ?blue card? training for new safety trainers. Level 4 is for experienced trainers who need to know how to improve their training and design training materials. Level 5 is for safety managers and executives to improve their knowledge of process safety, assessing material unwanted events and critical controls. For mine workers, we will accommodate English language learners, low literacy and education disadvantaged learners. We will use a suite of serious games, Learn with Harry, to encourage critical thinking about safety, with emphasis on worker health, hazards recognition, and MSHA's rules to live by. The serious games software has robust evaluation tools and can test improvement over time. For trainers we will develop and offer Instructional Design for the Safety and Technical Trainer Certificate Program using the competency model we are publishing through the Department of Labor. For managers and executives we will create a workshop to learn about critical controls and develop networking mechanism through our website and social media that allows lessons learned to be shared across companies and industry sectors including contractors, vendors, manufacturers, and operating companies. We will partner with rock products associations in the key states of California, Arizona, Texas, Nevada, and Colorado to offer our training programs to their member companies. All NIOSH NORA cross-sector topic areas will be addressed through addition of health modules in new miner, refresher training and train the trainer modules, and through inclusion of these topics within the critical control management activities. By integrating our training under a single competency framework, we will provide a coherent structure for evaluation and for impact. Relevance to public health: Anticipated outcomes include improved safety and health practices, a published competency model for mine safety trainers, workers empowered through active learning to be active participants in improving workplace safety and health, and increased sharing of lessons learned across industry segments. Collectively the outcomes should result in fewer mining injuries, illnesses and fatalities.
The objective of this proposal is to improve mining safety and health training in the western United States to support efforts to reduce mining injuries, illnesses and fatalities. Despite continued improvements over time, mining injuries and fatalities continue to occur in the mining industry, and reducing occupational illnesses remains challenging. Building on our past NIOSH miner training (U60) grants, we will use a competency- based framework to integrate health and safety training for miners, trainers, and managers.
