Inside looking out

Do you believe you are going to get hurt every morning when you get out of your car at your workplace?

That is the first question Dave Holland asks the frontline crews he works with.

For over 15 years, Holland has been working as an occupational health and safety (OHS) consultant, teaching the mining industry about risk and hazard assessment. His programs are designed to develop effective consultation processes and build risk awareness. But this wasn’t always his path.

In 2004, Holland was working as a geotechnical soil technician when his life changed forever.

Working alone on a development site, Holland was using a drill to test the soil in a paddock when his long hair got caught in a drill’s auger, taking his right ear and scalp with it. Holland broke his neck in three different places, and had serious head and facial injuries as his skin was ripped from his face.

“The truth is that people bring me to give presentations because I tell an awful story,” Holland told Safe to Work.

“I tell a story about my experience and around that story I put in learning outcomes. You’ve got a whole lot of academic discussion around you in these events. When I step forward, I ground the conversation.”

Holland has shared his experience in a bid to keep others safe.

“I guess the thing that stands out about me is passion. The passion is very real,” he said. “I bring energy to the table, and I bring in a capacity or a symbol that initiates a different kind of thinking in one’s mind.

“When I appear, the first thing is shock. And the next thing I do is start to talk, and it turns out that I’m not a stupid person.”

Holland will be speaking at this year’s Queensland Mining Industry Health and Safety Conference (QMIHSC), to be held on the Gold Coast from 20–23 August. The event has been promoting health and safety in the mining industry for more than three decades, and this year’s event promises to be bigger and better than ever. The conference provides opportunities to exchange information, form connections and foster proactive health and safety management techniques.

Holland’s OHS-focused presentation will open with him sharing the story of his accident. It will expand to cover a range of ideas and topics, including physical, psychological and cultural risk, hazard management, mental health issues, and how a workplace accident can affect family and friends.

“The discussion of what risk is and then being able to soften it down to say, ‘Let’s be realistic about what we do. Everything we do has risk’,” Holland said. “Is it about removing any risk or being present when we take the risk?

“There are several different learning outcomes that I weave throughout the presentation. It’s not about me stepping up and selling myself. It’s about influencing attendees to reconsider their own perceptions.”

This year’s QMIHSC has a very specific theme, ‘inside looking out’, where the mining industry will explore initiatives, programs and innovations from other “forward-thinking” industries.

Safe to Work spoke to conference chair Larnie Mackay about what people can expect in 2023.

“The conference is for anybody who is involved in the mining industry, to provide information and education, as well as opportunities to expand networks, to spread great news stories and to be able to spread learnings across industries,” Mackay said.

Mackay spoke about this year’s diverse group of speakers and how the program reflects the event’s theme.

“This year we have keynote speakers that are from various different industries, such as defence, air traffic control and psychology,” Mackay said.

“I have someone presenting who has a trade background, but she has transitioned across into psychology. Her presentation provides a really great oversight about looking at people with neurodiverse backgrounds and what it means to be able to bring different ways of thinking into a business or industry.”

When selecting the range of speakers, the committee was after people who had hands-on experience across heavy or high-risk industries.

“We were looking for people who can put the theory into practice,” Mackay said. “We had speakers in the past that could very much talk about the theory behind why we do what we do or why we should do things in a certain way, but they weren’t able to provide the tools that some of our delegates needed to be able to transition that theory into practice.

“This year, we have gone for quite a diverse range of keynote speakers. There will be theory and there will be practical, and there’s some in the middle that can take the theory and put it into practice.”

Holland wants to examine the meaning of the word ‘safety’.

“I have spent 15 years speaking about safety and, unfortunately, safety is a negative word,” she said. “Safety, if you peel it back, means to care.”

Delegates taking information from QMIHSC and implementing it into their work, Mackay said, is the next step towards change.

An example is the high reliability organisation (HRO) theory being applied to the mining industry.

QMIHSC speaker Mike Lockwood, who works in air traffic control, will discuss how he works to implement HRO theory all over the world.

“The mining industry has spoken about HRO theory for quite some time, saying that we really need to adopt the principles of HRO,” Mackay said. “Lockwood will give some very practical examples as to how HRO has been implemented in air traffic control.

“Looking at things you’re auditing in a different way isn’t a bad thing. Auditing and having that culture of putting your hand up to say, ‘I’ve made a mistake. This is what I’ve done, this is why I did it, and this was the outcome’, to then identify that there was a potential problem with that process.

“It’s a really positive culture of finding and fixing the problems, as opposed to, ‘I’m not going to report that or tell anybody’, because then history just keeps repeating itself.”

Another key speaker at QMIHSC will be Dr Catherine Ball, who has an extensive history in the infrastructure, utilities and resources sector.

“The culture of health and safety is now ingrained in me,” Ball told Safe to Work. “Any conversation about improving health and safety statistics is a conversation worth having.”

Ball will discuss the fact technology is not to be feared, and she wants people to walk away feeling more confident.

Technology can do so much; we must use it where we can,” she said.

“We should be engaging with emerging technologies and working out problems we are trying to solve. We need to ask better questions.”

Mackay hopes attendees will take away knowledge they can implement into their own workplaces, regardless of their position within a company.

“Change can happen at any rung on the ladder,” she said.

“If everybody takes back some positive change, or a way of improving the way people work to make things healthier and safer, we can start to make those incremental changes.”