BME mine safety research: integrating health and wellness metrics for engineers
Reviewed by Joe Ashwell
First reported on International Mining – News
30 Second Briefing
BME’s General Manager for Operational Excellence & SHERQ, Dr Ramesh Dhoorgapersadh, told the SAFEX International Congress XXI in Portugal that sustainable mine safety demands a “critical evolution” towards integrating health, wellness and broader human factors into risk management. His research links operational safety performance not only to traditional controls around blasting, explosives handling and SHERQ systems, but also to workers’ physical and mental health status. For mine operators, this points to embedding wellness metrics and human-factor diagnostics alongside conventional lagging and leading safety indicators.
Technical Brief
- SAFEX International Congress XXI in Portugal provided the platform, indicating explosives-industry focus and cross-operator benchmarking.
- BME’s SHERQ function integrates safety, health, environment, risk and quality under a single operational excellence portfolio.
- Dhoorgapersadh’s work is grounded in blasting and explosives-handling operations, where human-factor errors have high consequence.
- Research is being applied within BME’s own operations, giving access to real incident, near-miss and wellness datasets.
- SAFEX membership typically includes explosives manufacturers and users, so findings target both mine owners and blasting contractors.
- The work extends beyond compliance with statutory medical fitness checks, towards continuous health and wellness monitoring.
- Integration of wellness indicators with conventional SHERQ metrics enables multi-variable risk models rather than single-cause analyses.
- For other mining operations, the approach implies modifying safety management systems to formally incorporate human-factor diagnostics.
Our Take
BME’s safety and wellness emphasis in Portugal sits alongside its recent technical push on precise blast timing at the new AXXIS detonator plant in Kalgoorlie, suggesting the company is trying to link human‑factor performance with increasingly complex blasting systems.
Within our 1187 Mining stories, BME appears more often in process and reagent optimisation pieces than in traditional safety features, so this focus on health and wellness broadens its positioning from explosives supplier to a more holistic risk‑management partner for mine operators.
Prepared by collating external sources, AI-assisted tools, and Geomechanics.io’s proprietary mining database, then reviewed for technical accuracy & edited by our geotechnical team.
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