Health

Our employees are our most important asset, and promoting and enhancing their health and wellbeing is as vital as protecting their safety. So we are committed to reaching our goal of no new instances of occupational illness, as well as promoting the good health of all our employees and contractors.

The health management of all our stakeholders does not just remain in the workplace. We are active in establishing community health programmes in the areas where we mine.

How we support our employees' health

We introduced our Group health standards in 2004 and have audited sites' performance against them since 2005.  In 2007, a specialist company, independent of Rio Tinto, has been a part of these audits.  We have found that implementing the standards has led to a significant increase in all of our employees' awareness of health issues and to very noticeable improvements in performance.

The lung diseases related to long-term dust exposure are now in our past.  We have made significant strides in reducing the new cases of occupational asthma of the aluminium smelting industry although the acquisition of Alcan may increase numbers slightly.

Although technology is rapidly reducing physical demands on our employees, musculo-skeletal (MS) illnesses remain the most common cause of new occupational illnesses, particularly at our smelters where employees do heavy lifting.  We are seeking ways of engineering out these heavy lifting tasks and will review Alcan solutions to see if they can be applied more widely.

Heavy equipment also 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. We are working on engineering solutions to reduce noise levels.  We have established a collaborative forum to spread best practices in noise control throughout the Group.

We are increasingly operating in countries where the prevalence of HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria is high.  We have had a comprehensive HIV strategy in place for several years and this has assisted our workplaces achieve HIV prevalences significantly lower than our surrounding communities.  We believe that the mining industry has an important role in combating the spread of these diseases out in the communities also and therefore we work closely with the relevant government agencies and NGOs to enhance their capacity to respond to these diseases.

We have worked with ICMM and the 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.

We are working with our employees, Human Resources departments and medical insurers to design and develop active wellness programmes.

Our results

In 2004, we set an ambitious stretch target to reduce the rate (per 10 000 employees) of new cases of occupational illness by 40 per cent between 2003¹ and 2008. We met this target by the end of 2006.  We have continued working to reduce risks and at the end of 2007 had achieved a further 38 percent reduction.  In total, by the end of 2007, our new illness rate is 81 per cent lower than in 2003.

We remain behind our other major health target of achieving a 20 per cent reduction in the number of workers exposed to more than 85 decibels.  Since 2003, however, we have seen significant improvements in the measurement of noise exposures on sites with the recognition of new sources of noise.  We continue to make noise reduction an area of focus and at the end of 2007 we have achieved a 5.8 per cent reduction in exposures over 85 decibels compared to the 2004 baseline.  We anticipate further improvements in 2008.

¹ Target baseline year was mistated in 2007 Annual report