Analysis of Recommendations from Mining Incident Investigative Reports: A 50-Year Review

A systematic analysis was conducted using ten occupational health and safety commissioned reports from Canada, New Zealand, United States, United Kingdom, and Australia spanning from 1967 to 2015. The objective was to identify commonalities and differences in the key recommendations across the identified reports. The text-mining software Leximancer was utilized to analyze the content of the recommendations through the semantic extraction of dominant themes, and the relational extraction and mapping of thematic relationships against each other. The identified themes were then analyzed within the concept map to fully understand the relationships. Based on the concept map, the thematic analysis provided a longitudinal perspective of the recommendations, identifying six key themes and 49 sets of overlapping recommendations. Key themes included: health and safety hazards (n = 10), legislation, regulations and organizational structure (n = 13), emergency management and mine rescue (n = 9), training, education and competence (n = 10), technology (n = 4), and research (n = 3). The results of this analysis illustrate that the same hazards continue to be identified across reports and recommendations, regardless of time or country of origin. This indicates that the communication of recommendations and/or the strategies developed in response to the recommendations need to be further addressed.