TORONTO (miningweekly.com) – A new report by professional services firm Visser Deloitte has found that despite injuries to workers in the oil sands sector being on the decline, adopting data analysis tools and making some cultural shifts could improve worker safety.

In its report ‘Predictive Site Safety: People and Culture For Life’, Visser Deloitte found that worker injury accidents on oil sands sites had decreased by 14% since 2009.

However, 2014 was a difficult year for the mining and petroleum industry. Alberta Occupational Health and Safety's most recent study noted five fatalities in the first nine months of this year for the mining and petroleum industry.

Deloitte's national oil and gas sector leader in Canada and report author Geoff Hill said site safety started with building a culture of safety.

"At any industrial site, there's really no such thing as having too much safety training. As the labour crunch in the oil sands [sector] continues, you have more and more inexperienced people working with machines they might not have even heard of before they were hired,” he noted.

The report also outlined how new data analysis tools could be used to predict where accidents were most likely to take place and what measures could be put in place to prevent those accidents.

"In the report, we emphasise the importance of building a culture of safety, but we also think operators should live that culture as well. Safety analytics – looking at and studying how accidents have happened in the past so they can be prevented in the future – is a critical new tool operators have at their disposal.

"Safety analytics can also be used to really sharpen and focus safety training. It's a cycle – the more we study accidents, the better we can become at predicting and preventing them,” Hill stressed.

The report was the first in the ‘Gaining Ground in the Sands 2015’ series focusing on issues of critical importance in the oil sands industry. Subsequent reports would be released over the next few months.

The report was also the first major undertaking of Visser Deloitte, which was formed after Deloitte Canada acquired safety and compliance firm Visser Consulting in August. Visser Deloitte's mission is to bring safety in the oil sands sector to the forefront, and would incorporate Visser Consulting's 20 years of safety and regulatory compliance experience to Deloitte's client base.