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Mining Weekly reports that way ahead of the national lockdown, South Deep gold mine started an intensive and focused communication awareness campaign to shield its people from the coronavirus pandemic.
It placed a lot of reliance on leadership across the board, going down to basic family leadership, and put effective communication platforms. Martin Preece, head of Gold Fields’ SA region explained: “We've focused on leadership, a lot of communication awareness, a big drive on non-pharmaceutical interventions, pushing hygiene practices, social distancing, right from the beginning, and all learning new habits and new behaviours.” He added that one of the most important aspects has been South Deep’s “meaningful and collaborate approach with our colleagues from organised labour, who have stood side-by-side with us, helped us to develop protocols, and helped us drive the change of behaviour with our people”. To date, 45% of the workforce has been tested, totalling 1,768 tests. The tests have returned 1.1% positive, involving 21 active cases currently and one recovery. The positive cases include four people in the working-at-risk category, five in the return-to-work category, four in the risk-based sampling category and eight in the persons-under-investigation category. South Deep has 85% of its employees back at work. It has collaborated with startup company A2D24, which has developed two WhatsApp apps for the mine, one to connect with employees directly and the other to give people the opportunity to self-declare/screen before coming to work.
- Read the full original of the interesting report in the above regard at Mining Weekly
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