During 2008, we continued to drive personal accountability for safety, providing tools and resources for employees to actively care about themselves and others and build our “count on me” culture where our people take personal ownership of their work environment.

Our Basic Safety Process provides a structured system to integrate safety into all levels of the organization and actively engage each individual. As part of BSP, whenever an unsafe condition or behavior is predicted or observed, an employee is required to personally take corrective action and then complete an Accident Predictive Technique record. These records are then tracked, trends assessed, and measures implemented to further improve safety performance.

Employee and Contractor Safety

During fiscal 2008, we reduced employee recordable injuries by 12%, for a rate of 0.69, and contractor recordable injuries by 18%, for a rate of 0.55, reflecting a 30% improvement in recordable injury performance over the past two years. Employee lost-time injuries (LTIs) increased 8% to 0.24, primarily due to an increase in injuries in Europe, while the contractor LTI rate of 0.22 was essentially flat with the prior year. Performance varied by region, as we saw significant year-over-year improvement in the Americas, continued excellent performance in Asia, and a decline in performance in Europe. In response, we have increased our safety drills and audits to continue driving a focus on hazard identification and correction. While preventable vehicle accident rates (PVAR) in Europe increased due to a change in reporting criteria, the Americas and Asia delivered better-than-goal performance in PVAR.

Environment, Health and Safety (EH&S)
Training Our employees around the world are enrolled in an online Training Management and Delivery tool known as LSO. LSO enables us to manage EH&S training by assigning courses that are custom-tailored to the employee’s job assignment. There are approximately 450 global/regional EH&S courses offered, and over 60 core EH&S courses are provided to our global workforce in local language. Relevant courses are automatically “pushed” to each employee as they become due for completion, and compliance is monitored within the system.

European Industrial Gases Association (EIGA) Safety Awards
Gold award for Zaragoza (Spain): 15 years without LTIs	Silver award for Glogow (Poland): 10 years without LTIs	Bronze awards for Wilton (UK), Arrigorriaga (Spain) and Vilvoorde (Belgium): 5 years without LTIs	Annual Road Safety Award (Germany): lowest accident rate for cylinder vehicles driven 500,000–2,000,000 km.

Safety in (Cylinder) Numbers Our European Packaged Gases Group’s second annual Packaged Gases Safety Week—which included 50 Air Products sites in 12 countries—took place March 9–13, 2009. Events, ranging from safety presentations to advice on vehicle safety and fire extinguisher training, targeted more than 800 employees at plants and depots across Europe. The organization also reached out to health and safety bodies, local authorities, and fire and rescue services. In addition, many of our agents, who work directly with thousands of our customers, were trained to share our safety culture with these important stakeholders.

During 2008, we conducted nearly 130,000 hours of EH&S specific training, with employees averaging 6.2 hours for the year. Additionally, EH&S instruction is integrated into other job skills training and education for our global workforce.

Health and Wellness Programs
At Air Products, we provide a variety of educational, training, counseling and prevention programs to conserve and improve the mental and physical health of our global workforce.

Our Global Health and Wellness department facilitates and tracks medical certifications for more than 900 professional Air Products drivers in the U.S. and Canada. Good health, coupled with wellness, allows our drivers to deliver maximum results and have improved quality of life. A Driver Wellness Team from Global Health and Wellness, Global Operations and EHS&Q is working with our drivers to help them maintain, improve and sustain their health and fitness. A number of approaches are being used to assist drivers in improving lifestyle behaviors, including distributing educational health and wellness materials, providing online resources, wellness assessments and coaching. A team-based wellness competition is also being introduced.

Our Global Health and Wellness staff focuses on prevention and management of occupational injury and illness, education and initiatives toward healthy behaviors and health conservation, partnerships to promote positive health outcomes, and providing health and wellness services.