Health
Our employees are our most important asset. Promoting and enhancing their health and wellbeing is as vital as protecting their safety. We firmly believe that by supporting healthy lifestyles, health related risks such as fatigue, stress and obesity, and diseases such as HIV/AIDS, will be reduced. This will result in improvements in safety and health performance and in productivity. The investment in the health of our workers, particularly in the context of an ageing workforce and skilled labour shortage, is essential for ongoing business success. It will also ensure that we continue to make improvements in both health and safety performance.
We are committed to reaching our goal of no new cases of occupational illness. We believe that we will only achieve this through excellence in health risk management and the promotion of good health for all our employees. To achieve excellence in health risk management, we have put in place occupational health standards and set performance targets.
Our health management approach does not just remain in the workplace. We cannot be immune from the health of the communities around our sites. We have recognised at many sites the importance to our sustainability of providing assistance when required, and therefore we are active in establishing community health programmes (eg for HIV/AIDS and malaria) in the areas where we operate.
Managing occupational health risk
We introduced our risk based Group occupational health standards in 2004 to improve identification and management of health risks. The standards also improve the flow of information on health issues to managers, so that they can take a more active role in prevention. Performance against these standards is audited. Our managers and employees also benefit from an intranet portal where they share best practice advice and information.
Some workers are much more sensitive than others to contracting workplace related diseases. To manage this we emphasise, when relevant, prevention by personal health monitoring, and monitoring the workplace. Good examples of this are the programmes to manage occupational asthma risk in our aluminium smelters.
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.
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. In 2008, we updated our occupational health standards to:
- Align with our Health, Safety, Environment and Quality (HSEQ) management system
- Include recent leading practices
- Better address our changed exposure profile
Managing occupational illness
We treat an illness as "occupational" if workplace conditions are thought to be the cause or worsen it. The workplace does not have to be the only cause.
Like any responsible employer, we take steps to minimise any occurrences of illnesses that develop as a result of conditions in our workplaces. However, because of the nature of our business, we are also especially vigilant towards 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, demonstrating how well our dust control programmes are working. We have also made significant strides in reducing the 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, although numbers of new cases are decreasing at our sites. While we recognise that further reductions in noise exposed employees will prove challenging, we are committed to continual improvement of our performance in this area over the next few years to meet our stretch targets. We are working on engineering solutions and alternative ways of doing our work to reduce noise levels. We have established a noise community of practice to share learning and assist with the development of more effective noise improvement strategies throughout the Group.
Although technology is rapidly reducing physical demands on our employees, musculo-skeletal illnesses remain a common form of new occupational illnesses. We are seeking ways of engineering out heavy lifting tasks and will review available 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 our wellbeing programmes.
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Video
Project Daybreak
This video outlines Project Daybreak a project built on an old mine that is a social project aimed at sustainable development and building a sense of community.
