Performance
Health
An important element of our approach to sustainable development is the health and wellbeing of our employees, contractors and the people in the communities in which we operate.
We are committed to reaching our goal of no new cases of occupational illness and believe that we will only achieve this through excellence in health risk management and the promotion of good health for all our employees. We firmly believe that by supporting healthy lifestyles, health related risks such as fatigue, stress and obesity will be reduced, with resultant improvements in safety performance and productivity.
A gap analysis against Rio Tinto health standards has been conducted at the former Alcan sites and the identified gaps are being addressed according to the level of risk.
The inclusion of the former Alcan operations has altered our health exposure profile as a result of the expansion in our smelting and refining business. Rates of occupational illness in 2008 at former Alcan sites are higher than comparable Rio Tinto sites. In many cases this most likely reflects the stricter and different reporting definitions required by Rio Tinto. Consequently, the rate of new cases of occupational illness increased by almost 110 per cent to 46 per 10,000 employees in 2008. This increase was mainly a result of noise induced hearing loss, musculo-skeletal and stress cases reported at former Alcan sites.
We met our five year target to reduce the rate of new cases of occupational illness by 40 per cent (excluding former Alcan operations). We reduced the rate of new cases by 85 per cent over the 2003 to 2008 target period, achieving a rate of 15 new cases per 10,000 employees at former Rio Tinto sites by the end of 2008. Most significant has been the reduction in musculo-skeletal and noise induced hearing loss cases over this period. We attribute this to significant improvements in our risk management approach that have allowed us to identify our most harmful exposures and focus control strategies to reduce them.
However, we have not seen any improvement in the number of stress cases reported during the target period, which accounted for about 28 per cent of all cases reported at former Rio Tinto sites in 2008. For the first time the rate of reported stress cases exceeded hearing loss and almost matched musculo-skeletal cases. This is a global trend affecting most companies, and it will be an increasing focus of our health and wellbeing programmes.
The rate of employees exposed to an eight hour noise dose of more than 85db(A) at both former Rio Tinto and Alcan sites decreased by nine per cent to 3,380 per 10,000 employees in 2008, consistent with the previous efforts of both Rio Tinto and Alcan operations to achieve such a reduction driven by stretch targets.
Our 12 per cent reduction in the number of employees exposed to a noise dose of more than 85 decibels between 2004 and 2008 (excluding former Alcan operations) fell short of our 20 per cent reduction target, but was nevertheless a significant improvement. Monitoring improvements enabled us to better understand our exposure, but also resulted in an increased reporting of exposed workers after the baseline had been established. In addition, the complexity involved in assessing key contributing noise sources and then implementing practical and cost effective noise controls, particularly for heavy mobile equipment and diverse noise sources in smelters, was underestimated.
Although we recognise that further reductions will prove challenging, we are committed to continually improving our performance in this area over the next few years. We will therefore be establishing a noise community of practice to share learning and assist with the development of more effective noise improvement strategies. In addition we will continue to pursue engineering solutions and alternative ways of doing our work.
In 2008 we began introducing "Achieve Health", a health and wellbeing programme developed for our Australasian businesses. We also commenced work on a global framework to support health and wellbeing programmes across the Group, with prioritised implementation starting in 2009 with our US based businesses.
Rio Tinto operates in countries where the prevalence of HIV, tuberculosis and malaria is high. We are working closely with the international community of government agencies and NGOs concerned with these problems not only in Africa, but globally. For example, where we have operations located in regions with a generalised HIV epidemic (as defined by UNAIDS) we actively encourage all employees to know their HIV status through voluntary testing. We also require that all employees and their nominated partner have affordable access to treatment, care and support, including antiretroviral drugs. In 2008 we received a commendation from the Global Business Coalition against HIV, TB and Malaria for our commitment to community based HIV programmes.
