Health
Our employees are our most important asset. Promoting and enhancing their health and wellbeing is as vital as protecting their safety.
We believe that by supporting healthy lifestyles, health related risks such as fatigue, stress, obesity, and diseases such as HIV/AIDS will be reduced. Investing in the health of our workers, particularly in the context of an ageing workforce and skilled labour shortage, is essential for ongoing business success.
Our goal is no new cases of occupational illness. Our occupational health policy and performance standards, coupled with our health and wellbeing strategy and targets have been put in place to support this goal.
Our health management approach does not just remain in the workplace. At many sites we have recognised the importance of establishing community health programmes (eg HIV/AIDS and malaria) where we operate.
Managing occupational health risk
We introduced our Group wide occupational health standards in 2004 to improve identification and management of health risks. These performance standards are integrated with our custom built Health, Safety, Environment and Quality management system to ensure consistent application across the Group. We audit implementation of our standards and also benefit from sharing leading practices across the Group.
We have found that implementing the standards has led to a significant increase in all of our employees' awareness of health issues and to noticeable improvements in performance.
Some of our workers are more sensitive than others to contracting workplace related diseases, so we emphasise prevention by personal health monitoring and monitoring the workplace where relevant.
In 2010 we also focussed on the identification and classification of potential and emerging health risks and evaluation of our emergency response preparedness as part of our new Business Resilience and Recovery programme.
Managing occupational illness
We treat an illness as "occupational" if conditions in our workplace are thought to be the cause or to worsen it. The workplace does not have to be the only cause of the illness.
Like any responsible employer, we take steps to minimise occurrences of illnesses that develop as a result of conditions and exposures in our workplaces. Because of the nature of our business, we are especially vigilant of diseases caused by exposure to excessive dust, fume, noise, manual handling and vibration and also to all forms of radiation.
Lung diseases related to long term dust exposure are now rare in our workforce, demonstrating the effectiveness of our dust control programmes. We have also made significant strides in reducing the number of new cases of occupational asthma within our aluminium smelters.
Heavy equipment tends to be noisy, which is why noise induced hearing loss (NIHL) is still a problem for us. While we recognise that further reductions in noise exposures for our employees will prove challenging, we are committed to continuing to improve our performance. We are working on engineering solutions and alternative ways of doing our work with reduced noise levels. We have established a noise community of practice to share learnings and assist development of more effective noise improvement strategies.
Musculo-skeletal illnesses remain a common form of new occupational illnesses despite technology advancements rapidly reducing physical demands on our employees. We are continuing to seek ways of engineering out heavy lifting tasks and are reviewing available and proven ergonomic solutions to see if they can be applied more widely.
The nature of occupational illnesses is changing. Health conditions such as stress, fatigue and the normal results of ageing such as reduced physical capacity present different challenges to the traditional mining health issues. We are managing these conditions through the implementation of our health standards, our wellbeing strategy and associated programmes.
Rio Tinto operates two uranium mines, Ranger in Australia and Rössing in Namibia. When not appropriately managed, exposure to ionising radiation from uranium mines can pose potential health risks for workers or surrounding communities and sometimes there is understandable concern that those working or living near our uranium mines may be at risk.
In line with our occupational health standards, we continue to work on reducing radiation exposure to as low as reasonably practicable. Our monitoring has not recorded any employee above our 20 milliSievert (mSv) annual exposure limit for over a decade. Rio Tinto's exposure limit is well below the five year 100mSv and annual 50 mSv limits typically found in international protocols.
