Thiess Mt Owen has won the New South Wales Mineral Councils (NSWMC) Health Excellence Award with their Positively Healthy initiative at the NSW Mining Health, Safety, Environment and Community Awards dinner. With more than 500 people from across NSW in attendance, the awards showcased innovation across the mining industry.

The Positively Healthy program, which was created with the support of Ethos Health, is a voluntary annual health program that aims at improving the Mt Owen Mine Baseline Health Score by focusing on the NSWMC’s Reshape vision of one kilo at a time, one miner at a time, one year at a time.

Critical to the success of the program, and its receiving the award, was the program’s ability to engage such a significant segment of the workforce to make positive behaviour changes in their life to improve their health.

In 2016, 303 Mt Owen employees and contractors began the program undertaking an InBody Composition scan which measures body fat, muscle mass, visceral fat, mineral content and provides an overall health score out of 100. Individual and collective scores were produced with a collective baseline of 72.8 recorded.

Once the assessment was conducted, the program introduced prevention and treatment strategies to manage modifiable health and lifestyle risks, such as nutrition and diet, physical activity, smoking, sleep, alcohol and stress. Action plans targeted high need areas and supported the participants throughout the program with one-on-one sessions, workshops and team challenges.

Over the course of the first year. the collective baseline health score increased by 2.4 points, which indicates a significant improvement in participants health. Across the group, 146 people lost an average of 1 kilogram of body weight, and when analysing only people who lost weight, an average loss of 3.4 kilograms was achieved. One individual lost 36.9 kilograms over the 12 months of monitoring. Most significantly the average weight loss of 1 kilogram over the year was achieved, seeing Mt Owen and the NSWMC achieve their vision and reverse a population trend of gaining 0.3kg by fourfold.

In 2017, participation grew to 312 personnel which represents around an 82% participation rate of the current workforce, seeing the program achieve its second aim of increasing workforce participation.

This is the second year a program supported by Ethos Health has won this award. In 2017 Newcastle Coal Infrastructure Group (NCIG) won the Health Excellence Award with their Bounce Program, which included themes such as BMI improvement, increased movement function and improved nutrition.

The NSW Mining Health, Safety, Environment and Community Awards recognise excellence and innovation in the NSW mining industry.

IMAGE | Thiess Mt Owen wins with Ethos Program.