Telkom AR front.qxp

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Telkom Annual Report 2009
Safety, health and environment (continued)
To ensure Telkom complies with the
minimum safety requirements as per
national legislation and to support Telkom’s
OHS policy, a:
• Well structured SHE Governance policy
is developed and revised annually.
• Incident on Duty (IOD) system is
developed to provide intelligent
information to assist management in
identifying trends and to implement
corrective actions to mitigate future
incidents.
• Contractor management audit programme
is implemented to ensure
contractors are audited monthly to meet
the requirements of the Construction
Regulations; and
• Telkom Subsidiary audit initiative is
implemented to provide support to the
subsidiaries to meet minimum statutory
SHE requirements.
HIV/AIDS workplace programme
In addition to our international award, our
Thuso programme is recognised for its best
practices by researchers and academics
who visit us for benchmarking purposes.
Since the inception of our voluntary
counselling and testing programme (VCT) in
2004, 23,391 employees have been
tested. In the year under review,
2,353 employees, from a target population
of 3,178 at 52 sites, were tested.
We have 280 employees receiving antiretroviral
therapy of which the majority
have a normal sick absence profile, being
healthy and productive at work.
In analysing this data, 32% of HIV positive
employees are either in the process of
being registered or are unaccounted for.
This remains a challenge for the
programme to improve on this conversion
rate to get identified HIV positive
employees on to the programme. In the
2008/2009 performance cycle, there
were 74 new registrations on the
programme (40 via onsite VCT; 32 selfidentified
and two prophylaxis patients).
The gender distribution on the chronic
programme is 203 (52%) male and 186
(48%) female. The median age is 36 years
with ranges between four and 56 years.
We have adopted a conservative
approach in providing anti-retrovirals for
employees registered on the programme
with a CD4 count of 350 versus a
governmental and NGO norm of 200.
Using this as measurement category, only
14 (4.9%) of the 284 employees on antiretrovirals
are categorised in the AIDS or
fully blown AIDS category.
• Preventative strategy
Since 1996, we have dispensed free
condoms at all sites. In the year under
review more than 703,000 condoms
were dispensed and more than 120,000
expired condoms of previous governmental
issues were withdrawn.
• Peer education
Currently 594 employees have been
trained and registered as fully fledged peer
educators. It is gratifying to note that the
involvement of peer educators has
extended beyond the boundaries of the
Company into the communities they serve
via the adoption of various havens,
orphanages, hospices and presentations to
community youth groups. As a result, a
Champions Programme will be launched
later in 2009 to formalise community
involvement.
• Thuso Toll-free Call Centre
Some 4,234 calls were routed via the
Thuso Call Centre for the year under
review. Outbound calls comprised 65.5%
of these, mainly providing clinical support
to patients. Inbound personal advice calls
made up 29.7% of all calls.
• KABP Study
The regular KABP (Knowledge, Attitude,
Behaviour and Perception) studies which
test the general level of information,
understanding and influencing behaviour
of employees about education and
awareness interventions have been
extended to the HIV positive employees to
test their understanding and also determine
the level of stigmatisation experienced by
them in the workplace.
Environmental management
While our environmental impact is not big,
our contribution is not totally insignificant
and, as a result, during the year under review
we launched our Telkom Green Initiative, a
concerted effort to place green issues firmly
in the mainstream of our operations.
• Treatment protocols
In terms of treatment protocols, the following table reflects the current treatment status:
Treatment aspect Number of employees
HIV positive employees 708
HIV positive status via VCT 512 (72%)
HIV positive status via self-identification 196 (28%)
HIV employees registered on the Chronic Disease
Programme 389 (55%)
HIV employees registered on Medical Aid, NGO or
Government Programmes 92 (13%)
HIV positive employees on treatment (Expert Treatment
Programme (ETP)) 284 (40%)