Health and Safety
PZ Cussons is committed to having safe and healthy operations around the world and we continually strive to improve health and safety standards across all of our operating units. We seek to provide safe working environments for all our employees, contractors and visitors and to ensure compliance with all relevant health and safety laws and regulations at all our places of operation.
It is, therefore, with great sadness that we report that during the year an industrial accident resulted in the death of an employee. The accident was immediately reported to the relevant authorities and an internal investigation was also launched into the causes of the accident. Improvement actions and learnings have been communicated across the whole of the Group to prevent any recurrence. The Company has conveyed its deepest condolences to the family of the deceased.
We remain determined to drive continuous improvement across all of our businesses. We use regular internal and external audits to help drive continuous improvement, and all operating units participate in the PZ Cussons World Class Manufacturing programme delivering compliance checks and identification of improvement opportunities. Two of our operating units, PZ Cussons UK and PZ Cussons Indonesia, are certified in an internationally recognised Occupational Health and Safety management system, OHSAS 18001 and we have plans to roll this out across other operating units over the coming years. PZ Cussons Nigeria has already started a programme to achieve this certification. Further, Nigeria is also implementing risk assessment procedures with near miss or hazard identification procedures (HAZOP & HAZID). In all operating units employees are positively encouraged to identify and report hazards or near misses and to personally conduct work place risk assessments as part of personal objectives.
The business tracks and reports two key health and safety performance indicators in all operating units: Lost Time Incidents (LTI) per 200,000 hours worked and First Aid Cases (FAC) per 200,000 hours worked. LTIs include all health and safety occurrences which result in one day or more absence from work (excluding the day of incident); FAC include all health and safety occurrences (including LTIs) which result in the employee being given first aid. FAC include cases where employees are treated for incidents which occur outside of the workplace, as any treatment given may enable us to reduce the number of employee days lost. The FACs indicator was introduced to enable us to continue to improve our health and safety performance as we had successfully reduced LTIs in some operating units to an extremely low level (for example, one of our UK operations has now operated for over 1,200 days (nearly four years) without a LTI).
As the graph following shows, we have successfully reduced LTI frequency by 18.0% as a Group to a frequency rate of 0.41 per 200,000 hours worked and FACs have reduced by 14.1% to 2.04 per 200,000 hours worked. Our LTI frequency rate is better than industry standards; however, we will continue to drive improvement of these rates even further in the future.