Safety and health

Safe and well

People are our business, and we’ve no doubt about our first priority: doing everything we can to keep our employees safe and well with us. There’s no easy answer, but by leading with safety and investing in health and wellbeing, we’re getting ever closer to our goal of zero harm.

Doing everything to keep you safe

We’re putting improved rules, standards and new technologies in place to ensure effective management and control across our operations.

However, we still need to do more. We’ve been implementing our ‘learning from incidents’ and operational risk management programmes to prevent harm.

Our operations continue to increase and improve reporting of, and learning from, high potential incidents (HPIs) as a preventative tool to improve safety performance.

Building healthy lives

We need our people to be healthy, happy, engaged and fulfilled in work and in life. It makes us safer, more productive and a stronger force for good in the communities where we operate.

We tackle the threats to health and wellbeing wherever we find them, with separate programmes for checking the health of our people, for creating a healthier working environment and for encouraging healthy lifestyles.

There’s still more we can do to protect our people – from disease, and from noise and inhalation hazards, but by focusing on delivery we’re making measurable progress.

Occupational health

Zero Harm. It’s an idea that’s at the foundation of our approach to occupational health. We believe that none of our people should be injured or contract illness while at work. But what are we doing to reach that goal?

All of our efforts to help combat occupational health risks are guided by three principles:

We believe that all occupational illnesses are preventable.
We learn by assessing and monitoring exposure and surveillance of occupational disease incidence in order to prevent further harm.
We apply common, simple and non-negotiable standards throughout Anglo American.

And these principles are supported by a framework of measures and processes.

For example, common dangers to health such as noise, inhalable hazards, musculoskeletal disorders and fatigue have all been assigned mandatory technical standards at our sites. These standards include requirements for risk assessments, education and training, application of controls, and monitoring and review.

At our sites, the focus is on reduction of exposure to health hazards at the source through good engineering practice and rigorous maintenance of controls. Our standards go beyond legal compliance but compliance with the law will always be the minimum standard.

To support all these efforts, dangers to health are clearly and openly communicated at our sites with all stakeholders.

Taking care of our people is at the core of what we do. With the right level of rigour and effort, the goal of Zero Harm for occupational health is an achievable one.

Safety Health and Enviornment Policy (SHE)

SHE Management is integrated into everything we do, all the time, everywhere.

We commit to a high-performance and purpose-led culture in which everyone demonstrates strong leadership.

By doing so, we work together to maintain a safe workplace, a healthy environment, and to build and maintain thriving communities everywhere we work.

Download our SHE policy