Health and safety is of vital importance in our business. It is essential to provide all personnel at our sites with a safe place to work, and we recognise that any accident is disruptive to the running of the business. Accident Frequency Rate (AFR) is our reporting standard and is defined as the number of Lost Time Accidents (LTAs) divided by the number of hours worked, multiplied by 100,000.
We define a LTA as 24 hours absence from work – this is a much tighter definition than the more usual requirement of three days. As well as incidents involving employees at all our sites where we have operational control, we also report injuries to contractors at these plants.
It is important to provide all personnel at our sites with a safe place to work, and we seek to minimise any injuries to our staff. In order to help us improve our understanding and management of health and safety at our sites, we are placing an increased focus on monitoring total recordable injuries – any accident or injury, regardless of whether or not time is lost at work. By identifying trends, sharing lessons learned, and taking action in response to these incidents, we aim to reduce the potential for more serious accidents.
Health and Safety within International Power plc is based on three important elements:
All three are supported by a comprehensive risk assessment process.
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› Safety by engineering
It is delivered by comprehensive design reviews for new build projects, or in the case of an acquisition; a rigorous due diligence process is carried out to identify any risks. Plants are operated and maintained in line with applicable engineering standards with regular maintenance programmes ensuring that the equipment is always operating within design parameters.
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› Safety by management
All International Power plc assets have formally documented management systems which are derived from a set of corporate principles. These systems are reviewed against international best practice and updated regularly. The majority of our assets have obtained external accreditation of their management systems through OHSAS 18001. A process is ongoing to ensure that our remaining assets under operational control obtain accreditation by the end of 2010.
We also ensure that anyone in a supervisory position has an externally accredited health and safety qualification. In January 2007 the Executive Management team undertook the Institute for Occupational Safety & Health examination for senior executives.
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› Safety by behaviour
Safety by engineering and management can only be effective if everyone involved behaves in the appropriate manner, i.e. complies with the rules, looks after themselves and their colleagues and reports unsafe conditions. To support safety by behaviour we operate a behaviour based safety program, across the company, called 'Fresh Eyes'. The aim of 'Fresh Eyes' is that through regular work observations by colleagues, at risk behaviour and complacency can be identified and corrective action taken before any risks escalate into an incident.
Download the Fresh Eyes leaflet 
We carry out benchmarking both internally and externally to ensure that we are constantly up to date with international best practice.
In addition to providing a safe place of work for our employees, we also have proactive health programmes in place at the majority of our assets. These programmes provide regular health checks and encourage healthy lifestyles through a combination of training, health monitoring and subsidised gym memberships.
The reporting of health and safety issues is part of the Company's regular performance reporting and review process. Data on our health and safety performance indicators is reported within our Annual Report.
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