Our objective in health and safety is to ensure that all of our employees and contractors return home to their families at the end of every day healthy and well. We do this by putting management systems in place to make sure our employees are well trained, and our workplaces are safe. We also spend considerable time and energy analyzing our safety culture and behaviour to evaluate how these can be improved.

Management systems are designed to help prevent accidents, injuries and occupational diseases. We expect all employees and contractors to think about the risks of their work tasks before they begin work so that accidents and injuries can be anticipated and prevented.

We’re developing training programs to reinforce this behaviour. We believe we’ll realize the benefits in our health and safety performance over time as this approach becomes formalized and it becomes second nature to all employees and contractors.

We had the second-best safety performance in the company’s history in 2008, as measured by lost-time injury frequency. This accomplishment is all the more significant when it is placed in context – our employee and contractor hours increased by more than 45 percent in 2008, construction work at Las Cruces entered the phase of most significant risk, and we assumed responsibility for developing safety systems and culture in a remote part of Panama. This accomplishment is the direct result of the commitment and hard work of all of our employees and contractors at our operations, development projects and closed properties.

Our total injury frequency (TIF) increased by 45 percent mainly because of a significant increase in medical aid cases. Our disabling injury frequency (DIF) increased 8 percent because of a marked increase in modified work cases. This increase is partly the result of the implementation of modified work programs across the enterprise. Nevertheless, we will be focusing on both the TIF and DIF rates in 2009 to ensure these increases do not represent longer-term trends.

We continued to lay the groundwork for continued improvement by identifying gaps in our program compared to SECA standards and high consequence protocols. Çayeli introduced Life Saving Rules and began intensive supervisor training on the newly introduced management system components. We have increased training at most operations because we believe that effective training is necessary for employees and contractors to manage workplace risk.

Download the PDF of our health and safety performance in 2008.