Managing health and safety
The Chief Executive has overall responsibility for environment, health and safety matters throughout Smiths. The Group Human Resources Director, supported by the Director, Environment, Health and Safety, is responsible for implementing environment, health and safety policies across the Group. The Environment, Health and Safety Steering Committee monitors performance and sets strategic direction. The Committee includes representatives from all Smiths divisions and meets quarterly to set policy and targets and to review progress against goals.
The most senior director for each business unit is responsible for environment, health and safety matters within their unit, and business managers are responsible for making sure that the right resources are in place to manage the level of hazard and risk in their areas. A network of regional co-ordinators helps to ensure that local issues are supported and Group strategy and reporting requirements are met.
We operate an internal health and safety management system using proprietary audit software. We assess all our facilities for compliance once a year and this process indicates opportunities for improvement. Where we find areas of weakness we share knowledge and best practice from other parts of the Group to improve performance. This year we continued our record of steady improvement with the overall average scores from our facilities reaching 73% compliance against 70% last year.
Performance against targets
We monitor our safety performance using the United States Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) standard methodologies which define rates per 100 employees per year. However, whilst we have again seen improvement in our recordable incident rate and lost-time severity rate, our lost-time incident rate has not improved this year. We will be focusing on this in the coming year.
Our safety record was tarnished early in 2006 when an employee at the Smiths Aerospace facility in Manchester, Connecticut lost most of a finger and thumb in a machining accident. We quickly initiated a full audit of the site's operations, and this, together with a related OSHA audit, identified several actions, most of which we have now completed. We received a fine of US$134,000 from OSHA following the incident, and are continuing to make improvements to the operation of the site and to share lessons learned across the Group.
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