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
In recent years, the rate of new cases of occupational illness at Rio Tinto operations has been decreasing. However, integration of the former Alcan operations altered our health exposure profile in 2008.
We are targeting a 30 per cent reduction in the rate of cases of occupational illness per 10 000 employees from between 2008 and 2013. The main types of occupational illnesses recorded in our 2008 baseline are related to musculo-skeletal disorders, noise induced hearing loss and stress. The baseline excludes operations that were divested or flagged for divestment during 2009.
In 2010 we achieved a 56 per cent improvement in performance compared with 2008 with significant decreases in the number of reported cases of noise induced hearing loss (54 per cent), musculo-skeletal disorders (66 per cent) and stress (40 per cent).
Ongoing reductions in new cases of occupational illnesses will require further improvements in the management of risks posed by manual handling and noise exposure, as well as supporting healthy lifestyles through workplace wellbeing programmes.
We are also targeting a ten per cent reduction in the number of employees exposed to an eight hour noise dose of more than 85 decibels between 2008 and 2013.
In 2010, the number of employees reported as exposed increased by 0.3 per cent per 10,000 employees compared with 2008. Progress against this target has been slow; based upon business feedback we are expecting that most of the improvements for this target will occur in 2012 and 2013.
