Safety
Our safety vision is that "Together we will create an injury and illness free workplace where everyone goes home safe and healthy each day of their working life".
Safety is not about numbers - it's about people. The policies, standards, programmes and targets we set are important. While they have moved our performance forward in recent years, they alone will not deliver our safety vision.
We are progressing on our journey toward a zero harm culture where everyone knows that they make a difference and where all employees and contractors have the knowledge, competence and desire to work safely.
- Strategy
- Approach
- Focus areas
- Results
Regrettably we did not meet our goal of zero fatalities in 2010. Three people were fatally injured while working at Rio Tinto managed operations. These incidents occurred at the Iron Ore Company of Canada as a result of a fall from height, at the Alcan Packaging plant in Semarang as a result of an electric shock and at the Alcan Engineered Products Neuf Brisach operation in France as a result of being struck by a falling object. We have provided support and counselling to the families and workmates affected by these incidents. We have shared the lessons from these and other serious incidents across the Group.
We measure progress toward our goal of zero injuries through the all injury frequency rate (AIFR) which includes data for employees and contractors. At the end of 2010 our AIFR was 0.66, an improvement of 18 per cent from 2009. Over the last five years we have reduced our AIFR by 39 per cent. Our lost time injury frequency rate has also improved and was 0.36 per 200,000 hours worked in 2010.
Lower injury rates do not mean that serious incidents will not occur. We use significant potential incident reporting and remedial action closure measures to promote identification, investigation, management and sharing of lessons learnt from minor and near miss events with potentially fatal consequences. These metrics are linked to remuneration.
Higher consequence, lower frequency safety events are managed through targeted process safety reviews and use of our Semi-Quantitative Risk Assessment (SQRA) process. The risk reduction resulting from the SQRA process is used as a Group wide leading indicator for safety performance.
To drive improved performance at our sites where the most injuries are occurring, or where we face persistent challenges of repeated major injuries or fatalities, we have developed a site safety performance acceleration process. The process is built on the principles of diagnosing root causes of poor safety performance and, through the engagement of key people, developing site specific practical interventions that lead to sustainable safety improvements.
We have also established a framework that defines our expectations and the processes to assure implementation of our systems and standards during the development of major projects.
