Safety, health and wellbeing

We believe that a safe, healthy and energising working environment brings benefit for our employees and for our business, through people’s sustained engagement and contribution to AstraZeneca’s success.

Providing a safe workplace and promoting the health and wellbeing of all our people remains a core consideration. Our commitment means that we work continuously to:

• Ensure that safety, health and wellbeing considerations are integrated across all our activities.
• Identify risks and ensure that these are understood and managed responsibly.
• Help employees to understand their personal health risks and empower them to manage these.
• Set clear targets focused on continuous improvement.

Our global Safety, Health and Environment (SHE) Policy describes what we expect from our employees and we have global standards and procedures which detail the minimum requirements in key risk areas.

In January 2011, we launched a new SHE strategy and a complementary Health and Wellbeing strategy with associated objectives and targets for 2011-2015. These are closely aligned with our business objectives and are designed to make sure that our improvement activity stays focused on supporting safe, efficient and sustainable operations across the company as we re-shape and grow our business.

Our safety, health and wellbeing targets for 2011-2015 are:

• Fatalities: zero tolerance
• Accidents and illnesses: 25% reduction in combined accident and illness rate
• Driver safety: 40% reduction in collision rate
• Health & wellbeing: 80% of sites offer our 6 essential health programmes or services

In this section, you can read more about our approach (link) to fostering continuous improvement in key aspects of our commitment, together with details of our performance to date.