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.

Creating and maintaining safe workplaces is a shared responsibility. The company, its managers and supervisors, and all employees and contract workers have a role to play in protecting lives and reducing injuries.

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.

Safety performance did not improve as much as targeted in 2009, despite improvements in several key trailing indicators. While we met our key criteria of no fatalities, made improvements in both total injury frequency and disabling injury frequency, and had the best injury severity results in our history, our lost-time injury frequency did not improve.

Key Safety Highlights for 2009

• no fatalities at our majority-owned operations
• lost-time injury frequency (LTIF) did not improve
• total injury frequency (TIF) improved by 22 percent
• disabling injury frequency (DIF) improved by 13 percent
• the severity of our workplace disabling injuries decreased by 91 percent and was the best performance in our history 
• medical aid frequency was 2.2 per 200,000 hours worked versus the MASHA rate of 5.3.

Download the PDF of our safety performance in 2009.