Committee Member

Darren Head

FAusIMM

Health and Safety Manager, Ionic Rare Earths Ltd
Health and Safety Society, AusIMM

Darren’s WHSE experience spans more than 30 years across a wide section of industries including Mining, Manufacturing and Retail. He has worked as an HSE Manager and prior to that as Chief Geologist within the Mining sector in Australia, a consulting Manager in Victoria and is currently working as Health and Safety Manager with Ionic Rare Earths Ltd based in Melbourne.
As a geologist, Darren is proud to have been a member of the team that transformed open pit gold mining in Australia. Darren led the geological team at KCGM's 'Super Pit' who successfully developed grade control practices that supported mining to progress from small scale, low tonnage operations working on 1.5m benches through to an Iron Ore scale mine operating on 10m benches.

Darren has significant experience in a range of WHS activities including:

• Safety Leadership
• Risk Management (particularly Critical Risk Control and Effectiveness analysis)
• WHSE systems development
• WHSE systems Compliance & Conformance auditing
• WHSE Training and;
• Emergency Response

As well safety, Darren has mining skills which he is still passionate about such as:

• Near mine exploration,
• Resource development, and
• Grade control and reconciliation.

As a WHS professional, Darren has particular expertise in the successful creation and development of safety systems at the operating level and understands the WHS needs of both management and front line employees. He is a qualified Principal OHS auditor having audited around Australia and Internationally. In addition, Darren devloped the 'Six Principles of Safety' model and is passionate about safety performance and the organisational, cultural and behavioural changes required to achieve sustainable safety performance improvement.

His goal is to help businesses make WHS improvement a consequence of being a great organisation.

Specialties: Organisational Safety Culture, Mining safety, WHS Systems auditing (AS4801, BS18001), WHS systems development, Critical Risk Management.