Serious About Safety: Our Safety Culture

To coincide with our 2nd Annual International Health & Safety week, being held this week across our global operations, we’re kicking off a new blog series: Serious about Safety.

In this series, we will be covering all things health and safety, including: mine rescue training, mental health, drug & alcohol policies, safety procedures and the importance of being prepared for the job at hand. We’ll also highlight some of the activities that occurred at our sites during safety week.

We kick off this series by talking about our safety culture and how safety is ingrained in everything we do.

Creating a Culture of Safety Across Our Operations

People are the heart of our business and our primary concern is their safety and well-being. Working in a mine has inherent safety risks and it is our job to mitigate those risks by training our employees and contractors in safety protocols and procedures.

In 2017 we launched our Global Health & Safety Directive, which was designed to create and sustain injury-free and healthy work environments for our employees and contractors. The Directive recognizes the importance of strong leadership in creating a culture of safety throughout Eldorado. For us, a culture of safety means that each person values their safety and the safety of those around them, leading to safety conscious behavior.

“By integrating health & safety awareness into our day-to-day activities, we create a foundation from which we can work to continuously improve our health & safety performance and accomplish our most important task: the prevention of harm.”

George Burns, President & CEO of Eldorado Gold

Our Safety Goal: Going Home Safe Everyday

At Eldorado we work hard to foster safety as a core value. Having everybody return home safely every day is out goal. One of the ways we do this is by monitoring our safety performance across our global sites. Within the industry, there are three main measures of safety performance, which include: lost-time injury frequency rate (“LTIFR”), total recordable injury frequency rate (“TRIFR”), and fatalities.

  • LTIFR: is the number of lost-time injuries that occurred per million man-hours worked.
  • TRIFR: is the number of lost-time incidents and other injuries requiring first aid, including fatalities, per million man-hours worked.

Over the years we have improved our safety record. From 2017 to 2018 we reduced the number of lost-time injuries, which is a step in the right direction. However, the total number of recordable incidents or injuries increased slightly over the same period, indicating there is still work to be done.

Golden Rules

Our Golden Rules handbook supports our safety culture
The Golden Rules handbook at Kisladag, in Turkey.

To further advance our safety culture, we developed the Golden Rules Health & Safety Handbook. The handbook is a part of all employee, contractor and visitor PPE (personal protective equipment) and is mandatory to carry at all times while on site.

The Golden Rules outline specific health & safety risks and risk-mitigation procedures that must be followed across our operations.

Check out the video below to hear directly from George Burns and Paul Skayman, Eldorado’s Chief Operating Officer about the Golden Rules safety handbook and importance of safety in the mining industry.

Check out some of the blog posts we published for last years’ Annual International Health & Safety Week:

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