Safety at Aurizon
Delivering safely
Safety is vital to Aurizon; we know that to achieve operational performance and to maintain our social licence to operate, we must ensure the safety of our employees, our contractors and our communities.
At Aurizon, our safety goal is to protect ourselves, each other and our communities. We deliver safely by living all of our values: Safety, People, Integrity, Customer and Excellence.
Our safety value ‘We know safe, we choose safe’ reinforces the personal commitment our people make to delivering safely each and every day.
Our Safety, Health and Environment Commitment outlines our safety goal and value, as well as our framework for delivering safely and our commitment to safety.
Our safety culture
Aurizon is committed to continually improving the safety culture and performance of the Company. As part of our commitment to safety, we continue to embed a learning culture to ensure risks and hazards are mitigated and safety is at the forefront of everything we do.
We have a fully-integrated Safety Management System that supports the management of incidents, hazards, near misses and safety interactions.
To support the ongoing development of our strong safety culture, we are undertaking several safety improvement initiatives, including:
- streamlining and simplifying our Safety Management System
- providing safety leadership training for our frontline leaders
- improving organisational learning from safety, health and environment incidents.
Aurizon's safety performance
Through our safety journey, we continue to embed a learning culture to ensure the risks and hazards are mitigated and that our people keep safety at the forefront of everything we do.
To help us learn and improve, we record and investigate all safety incidents. Our key safety metrics are:
TRIFR encompasses all reportable injuries including restricted work injuries.
SIRF measures the number of incidents that have the potential to cause or did actually cause serious injury or death per million hours worked. This measure, reflecting Aurizon's broader operational profile, helps direct our efforts to preventing serious injury events across all of Aurizon’s operations and covers all rail and non-rail operations.
Our culture of continuous improvement
At Aurizon, we continually strive to achieve our goal of protecting ourselves, each other and our communities. This includes building a more mature safety culture, enhancing our safety leadership and training, and improving our systems and processes.
We encourage all employees to actively identify opportunities to improve safety. Having safety interactions between employees at all levels across Aurizon not only identifies unsafe behaviours in the workplace but also acknowledges good safety practices. A safety interaction is a safety leadership activity, engaging those involved in a task in a constructive conversation about safety.
While we focus on real-time engagement, we also implement preventative measures such as ‘STOP! Take Time and Switch On’. The purpose of these measures is for the worker to switch on to safety and actively look for potential hazards that could impact their safety prior to commencing a task. Once potential hazards are identified, workers must arrange appropriate control measures before commencing the task.
Health and Wellbeing
We are committed to protecting our people and supporting their long-term health and wellbeing.
We understand that ensuring the health and wellbeing of our people requires us to look beyond the scope of traditional safety programs.
Since the inception of our enterprise-wide Health and Wellbeing Strategy in FY2017, we have focused on delivering programs across our offices and regional operations that focus on enhancing the physical and mental wellbeing of our employees. this includes the provision of a number of preventative health measures, including fitness for work assessment, influenza vaccinations, discounted corporate health insurance and a comprehensive Employee Assistance Program for employees and their families.
Aurizon’s Mental Health Peer Support Program is a network of employees trained in Mental Health First Aid (MHFA) to support their workmates in times of need.
The group represents a diverse range of volunteers from all levels of and across our business who are passionate and willing to support their workmates. The MHFA are promoted across our business as the first point of contact for those struggling and wanting a confidential chat. The MHFA are not trained to resolve problems, rather they are equipped to facilitate ways of connecting struggling peers with professional help, e.g. Employee Assistance Program (EAP), GP, or psychologist counselling when required.
Contractors
Contractors undertaking work on Aurizon premises are required to comply with Aurizon’s Safety Management System requirements. Contractors undertake a compressive safety induction with Aurizon and are expected to deliver their work safely in line with the Company’s Safety, Health and Environment Commitment.