Employee and Contractor Safety

The Safety Section’s Organizational Structure continued to undergo major changes over the course of 2019, growing in size to ensure sufficient technical expertise to provide a professional advisory service to the operational staff and leadership.

QS employed an HSE trainer who worked closely with the Learning & Development Department to identify and close gaps in the HSE training matrix. This has allowed the company to provide more training sessions, have better control on the content of the training programs, make it more plant specific, as well as having an overall benefit on the cost reduction as many of the courses were delivered in-house.

During 2019, the work that was started as part of the Aman program continued with the reporting of unsafe acts and conditions to enhance the safety culture within QS, which involved all the employees working for QS. The information was used to establish trends and determine where we could improve. A Behavioural Based Safety officer were also appointed towards the end of 2019 with intention to focus on the information that is gathered and analyse the results and allow HSE to make recommendations on how to improve the culture and also to provide the appropriate training.

New HSE committees, consisting of HSE and Operational representatives as members, were established to take
charge of the following:

• Audits and Inspections
• Confined space and Working at Height
• Rewards and Recognition
• Permit to Work and Lock out Tag Out
• Process Safety Management

In terms of Safety performance for the year, Qatar Steel had an overall decrease in the number of incidents for company and contractor employees, but unfortunately the company’s employee lost time injury frequency rate (LTIFR) rate increased to 1.06 in 2019, due to two incidents of a worker fall from height. In 2019, Qatar Steel succeeded in reducing the contractors LTIFR to 0.18 – a 38% decrease from 2018- and in reducing the number of minor injuries amongst employees by 64% to only 4 recorded cases in 2019. In addition, for the 2nd year in a row there were no work-related fatalities, neither for employees nor for contractors. Qatar Steel shows good progress in terms of the overall Safety performance with a continuous downward trend in recent years.

Safety Performance

* Since 2017, we track Near Missed Reported for both contractors and employees using the same system