Safety programmes
Everyone's behaviour contributes to an injury free workplace. Full and consistent implementation of and accountability for Rio Tinto's comprehensive standards, guidelines, systems and procedures is required across the Group. We are continuing to build a supportive safety culture that includes visible leadership, ongoing education and training and a high level of participation by everyone in the workplace.
We place an uncompromising emphasis on incident investigation, follow up and the prevention of repeat incidents, hazard identification, risk assessment, risk management and effective communication. We measure assurance through operational, corporate and external auditing and reporting processes.
Rio Tinto's goal is zero harm. We know that we have some way to go to achieve this. Group targets are directed towards that goal.
To achieve our safety goal, our focus is on leadership, individual accountability, setting appropriate targets, interaction in the workplace, implementing minimum safety standards, and auditing performance against those standards.
During 2005 we worked on a number of areas to improve safety management and facilitate the transfer of leading practice across the Group. These included:
We are taking further steps to increase safety leadership and in the process we are building on the achievements of the previous five years, during which we managed to cut the lost time injury frequency rate by a significant 56 per cent. As we move forward we continue to be focused on leadership, setting demanding but achievable targets, engaging our people in interactive safety audits, achieving full compliance with our safety standards, learning from our incidents and near misses and developing a greater self awareness and personal accountability in all our employees regarding their own safety and those around them. Stretching targets have been integrated into our business plans and these increase the focus on all injuries as opposed to lost time injury frequency rates. Supporting these will allow Rio Tinto to achieve its five year safety target set in 2004 to reduce its AIFR and LTIFR by 50 per cent between 2003 and 2008.
During the year we have made progress in revising critical aspects of our safety standards and guidelines that were introduced in 2000. This included important changes in our vehicles and driving standard and the issuing of a light vehicle driving guideline. Further analysis of significant incidents led to the recent review of our electrical standard. A panel of electrical experts from within the Group reviewed the standard that was introduced in 2000, changes to legislations that have occurred in this field since that time, recent incidents and the root causes associated with them, and leading practices from within and external to the Group.
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