The Australian Government is establishing a incident reporting database to improve the occupational health and safety of miners.
The Ministerial Council on Mineral and Petroleum Resources (MCMPR) aims to achieve a consistent occupational health and safety regime in the Australian mining industry through seven key strategies, including reliable data collection, consultation mechanisms and a collaborative approach to research.
In November 2005, MCMPR established a tripartite steering group to progress the development of the seven strategies. The steering group comprises representatives of all state/Northern Territory and Australian governments, industry associations and trade unions.
According to department documents, the goal of data collection and analysis is to develop a national mining industry dataset, and to facilitate the consistent collection and analysis of data across jurisdictions.
“All jurisdictions have committed to adopting the national mining industry dataset outlined in the NMSF Implementation Report, which comprises a range of incident-related data as well as quarterly statistics in relation to number of employees, number of hours worked and so on," the documents read.
The national database would be both a repository for the national dataset and an incident reporting tool that can be accessed by mine sites for the purpose of reporting incidents to state regulators.
“As a number of jurisdictions have existing standalone databases for the reporting of their own incident data, the national database would also need to have the capacity to feed information to and from these existing systems,” the documents state.
In February 2010, a solution architecture design and recommendations report was developed based on the varying jurisdictional technical requirements for the database.
The Department of Resources, Energy and Tourism (RET) is looking for contractors to submit a tender for the development of this database.
The scope of the project includes the development and implementation by December 2011, in order for the database to be operational from January 2012.
It will be hosted by RET and will include delivery of software licence and media. It requires a database with 90 days warranty, three years support and maintenance.