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.
- Occupational health
- Wellbeing
- Community
- Results
We operate in a number of countries where the prevalence of HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria is high.
We have had a HIV strategy and a HIV standard in place for several years which have helped our workplaces achieve HIV prevalence significantly lower than our surrounding communities. However, the success of our workplace programmes will ultimately be influenced by the ability of our surrounding communities to develop effective prevention and treatment responses to the HIV epidemic.
We are committed to supporting our communities, enhancing their capacity in this area. We are working closely with the international community of government agencies and non government organisations (NGOs) concerned with these problems not only in Africa, but globally.
We have also worked with the International Council on Mining and Metals and other major mining companies to produce practical guidelines for mine managers on implementing programmes to manage HIV, tuberculosis and malaria as a parallel process to manage these diseases.
Our Alucam operation in Cameroon and the community programme surrounding our Palabora mine in South Africa have both been awarded commendations by the Global Business Coalition for HIV/AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria.
Dealing with HIV/AIDS in the workplace
We take our lead from the International Labour Organisation's (ILO) Code of Practice on HIV/AIDS and the world of work. We do not tolerate discrimination towards employees who are diagnosed with the disease. Nor do we screen for it during the recruitment process, or use screening as a condition of employment.
We have a global, risk based standard that has four key workplace components:
- prevention, awareness and education;
- voluntary counselling and testing (VCT);
- wellbeing, counselling and treatment; and
- monitoring and evaluation.
Where we have operations in regions with a generalised HIV epidemic (as defined by UNAIDS) we actively encourage all employees to know their HIV status through voluntary testing. In this way, each worker can take the necessary steps to remain infection free if negative, or avoid spreading the infection and access the appropriate support and treatment if positive. All employees and their nominated partner can have affordable access to treatment, care and support, including antiretroviral drugs (ARVs).
On a broader scale, we acknowledge the enormous cost of supplying and supporting universal access to ARVs across Africa. Long term, the development of a prophylactic (prevention) vaccine is needed to defeat this epidemic. However, we believe that this is at least a decade away.
In recognition of this need, we were a member of a private sector initiative supporting research into a therapeutic (for treatment as opposed to prevention) HIV/AIDS vaccine in South Africa. Unfortunately, when the study concluded in August 2010, the vaccine had not produced statistically significant immunological response. However, during the first week of the trial it did show a reduced viral load in those patients who had not received HIV medications. This result is being further investigated to understand its significance. Although a disappointing outcome overall, our support of this trial has contributed significant knowledge to researchers attempting to develop a successful HIV vaccine.
