Tate & Lyle commended for refined health practice

News | HSW
01.06.2006

Sugar refiner Tate & Lyle is the first company to be declared a "model business" under a unique London initiative to reward firms for their contribution to health improvement.

Business Communities of Health - run jointly by the regeneration body  East London Business Alliance (ELBA) and Newham NHS Primary Care Trust - is intended to encourage local businesses to work with the NHS to improve employee and community health. ELBA is promoting the scheme among its 100 or so member companies.

At the scheme's launch on 19 April, Harry Cayton, NHS national director for patients and the public, presented ELBA member Tate & Lyle with the award. Ian Bacon, chief executive of Tate & Lyle Sugars, Europe, believes the initiative brings "clear benefits" for employees and the business.

The company's initiatives  include health awareness campaigns, active support for employees to stop smoking, healthy eating, manual handling training (safe lifting in the workplace and home), flu jabs, annual medicals, first-aid support and fitness improvement, as well as counselling and a travel clinic. All 1,240 Tate & Lyle employees working in the UK have access to the facilities and some services are available to families and contractors.

The company also runs a health and safety training programme, which helped reduce workplace injuries by 60% from 2002 to 2005. Rachel Tofts, head of human resources, said, "Two core initiatives are DuPont's STOP (safety training observation programme) and our task-based risk analysis. We have also significantly reduced sickness absence following the introduction of a new sickness/absence policy to help manage people's needs effectively." She says this means looking for underlying causes of absence and "ensuring that the right treatment is on hand and where necessary seeking alternative roles for people if sickness means they're unable to continue in their existing positions in the long or short term."