NORTHAMPTON, MA / ACCESSWIRE / September 19, 2024 / With a global workforce in a variety of settings including offices, laboratories and manufacturing plants, maintaining a safe and healthy workplace for our Viatris colleagues regardless of their location is imperative.
We work systematically to establish a culture of health and safety. Viatris' global Environmental, Health and Safety (EHS) Management system, technical requirements, processes and systems across our locations form the foundation; however, to truly instill and uphold a culture of health and safety, we must also lead by example through our behavior, communication and tone at the top. To continuously improve and enhance risk awareness and mitigation, we establish areas of focus for our health and safety management year over year. In 2023, areas of particular focus included enhancing safety culture, process safety, electrical safety and equipment safety.
We work proactively on incident prevention, diligently working every day to identify and reduce health and safety risks to both our colleagues and the communities in which we operate. Our total recordable incident rate in 2023 was 0.50 versus an industry average of 1.6.1
Leadership and communication are important aspects of establishing a strong safety culture and performance. We encourage and expect our leaders to continuously reinforce safety messages and maintain open 1Recordable cases per 200,000 hours worked Sources communication with their teams. All of our operations sites have a Safety Culture Enhancement Plan, which is to be regularly reviewed and updated. In addition, we also:
Completed 11 safety climate assessments across our locations using a Safety Climate tool developed by Global EHS leaders
Expanded our Safety Walk Around program, conducting more than 690 safety walks by site leadership teams resulting in Prevention Opportunities and 1,100 safety conversations
Continued the Viatris Safety Culture Webinar Series, with more than 215 leaders attending
Held refresher training on our VSafety Situational Awareness program, which was launched in 2022 with a goal of reducing the frequency and severity of incidents where the human factor is a key contributor, and extended the program to more sites including in Ireland and France
Expanded Safety Leadership Coaching to more sites globally
Enhancing Process Safety
Working systematically with health and safety risks associated with the manufacturing process, known as Process Safety, is a central part of our health and safety management. In 2023, we continued to enhance our Process Safety Global Program, which was developed and launched globally the year before along with the related technical requirements. We utilized Teams meetings to roll out initial training and developed a companywide Process Safety Introduction eLearning program to integrate an overview of our process safety program into our site operations rolebased curricula.
An enhanced risk assessment program was rolled out across manufacturing locations to capture and evaluate risks associated with the development and manufacturing of products. Approximately 1,840 risk assessments were conducted through the tool, generating valuable insights to help to reduce risks. In Hyderabad, India, a state-of-the-art Process Safety lab is being established to analyze process safety hazards both from chemical reactivity and powder dust explosivity. To capture any process safety risks during scale up of new products from the R&D sites in India, almost 60 new products were reviewed to incorporate process safety information (PSI) data, which included preliminary risk assessment and powder safety data. The data were provided to the manufacturing locations as a part of technical transfer documentation, which will be further used by the facilities during detailed site level risk assessments.
One of those risks involved bursting of rupture discs, which are used on equipment to reduce pressure energy and avoid catastrophic equipment failure. The Process Safety team worked with a site to analyze the causes of failure and implemented new processes, resulting in reducing the failure rate.
Further, in 2023, we implemented a world-class Process Safety management assessment program at our facility in Indore, India. We received external certification for the program by the International Sustainability Rating System (ISRS) in its ninth and latest updated edition.
Developing an Enhanced Incident Reporting System for Non-Operations Colleagues
Throughout 2023, the Global EHS Systems Team worked with EHS Regional leaders and and non-operations EHS liaisons to enhance an incident reporting system to capture incidents involving our non-operations colleagues, which includes non-operations office-based colleagues, colleagues who are officially designated as working remotely and commercial colleagues who may fit into either of those categories. The system provides a simple, easy-to-use report that is easily accessible from the company's intranet so that non-operations colleagues can quickly and easily report any work-related injuries or illnesses. Global and Regional EHS teams can then provide assistance with investigations, root cause analyses and corrective actions to prevent the same or similar incidents from occurring in the future.
View the full 2023 Sustainability Report.
Sources
1 Recordable cases per 200,000 hours worked
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SOURCE: Viatris
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