If you’re an operator or a production-operator at a surface mine in the U.S., you know you’ve got to provide safety training for your miners. (If this is news to you, we’ll give you some relevant news and definitions about that in just a second.)

In addition, the production-operator and a contracting company share responsibility for making sure that contract employees working at a mine site get safety training as well. We’ve covered that all in our recent MSHA Part 46 Training Requirements for Contractors article.

But in addition to that, you’ve also got to provide safety training to your employees who are not miners. And that’s what we’re going to explain in this article.

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Are you involved in mine safety training, perhaps for Part 46 and/or Part 48 of MSHA’s safety training requirement?

If so, what does your mining safety training program look like today? How do you deliver your training? Is it effective? Do you have enough time to do it all?

And how do you keep on top of things like making sure all new employees complete their training in the first 90 days, or that all miners get their annual refresher training on time?

And while we’re at it, how do you create and store all your records of training, run reports on that training, and create the training plan and other documentation required by MSHA?

If  you’re like a lot of people, you struggle to do all this, or to do all this well. Or maybe you’re doing it all and doing it all well, but you recognize that you could still improve.

If that’s you, this article may be of interest to you. In it, we’re going to show you how some online training tools can help make your mining safety training program more effective while also reducing the amount of time you have to spend on clerical, organization, and recordkeeping tasks.

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This is an older article and is based on materials OSHA created BEFORE they finalized their recent Safety and Health Management guidelines. This article still has a lot of useful information, and we encourage you to read it, but before you begin, know that you may also be interested in some of the following articles:

• Safety and Health Management in 5 Steps (based on ANSI Z10 and OSHA’s new guidance)
• Safety and Health Management Best Practices (an overview of OSHA’s new guidance)
• The first article in our multi-article series on safety and health management (introduces several different standards and guidelines than look in detail at ANSI Z10)
• An extended introduction to the new ISO 45001 Safety and Health Management Systems standard

And with that said, we’ll let you get back to this older article…

OSHA recommends that every workplace set up a Safety and Health Management program. The fact that OSHA says it’s a good idea is a pretty persuasive reason to do it, we think.

But in addition, creating a safety and health management program also decreases incident rates, including injuries and illnesses. And that’s good.

And health and safety management programs also have a financial benefit, saving companies money. So win/win/win, right?

In this article, we’ll explain more fully some of the reasons for having a safety and health management program that we just introduced above. Then we’ll explain the features of a safety and health management system. And we’ll include information and helpful links to other resources that can help you create, implement, and maintain your safety and health management program.

By the time you’re done reading this, you’ll have enough information to get moving in a positive direction, or maybe add some additional tweaks to your existing health and safety management program.

Note: Much of the information in this article is drawn from OSHA’s Safety and Health Management Systems e-tool, which is a great resource and which itself includes a lot of links to other great safety and health resources. Check it out!
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In a recent post, we looked at the role of a “competent person” for the MSHA Part 46 training regulations.

That was so much fun, we thought we’d expand the net and turn our attention to a similar (but slightly different) role in the MSHA Part 48 training regulations: the MSHA-approved instructor.

It would be handy if the people who provide the mandatory MSHA compliance training for Part 46 had the same name for their role that the people who do it for Part 48 do. But, they don’t. And it would be nice if the rules for becoming a Part 46 trainer were the same as the rules for becoming a Part 48 trainer, but that’s not how it works. Sometimes life just isn’t as easy or fun as we wish it were. In related news, you can’t have your cake and eat it too, and you didn’t get a pony for your birthday.

But, given that unfortunate news, let’s turn our attention to Part 48, see what’s what, and make life that one little bit easier. At least for those of us in the mining safety world.

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