Aligning with our company’s business mission to protect and promote health, Merck is committed to providing a safe and healthy workplace for its employees around the world.

We want to ensure that our employees return home from work every day healthy and safe. As part of this commitment, Merck expects every employee to conduct his or her job without compromising personal safety and health, or the safety and health of other members of our workforce and the communities in which we operate.

We provide employees with a wide variety of health programs reflecting the highest standards of medical care and regulatory requirements. We also take preventive actions and closely track workplace accidents, injuries and illnesses, so we can address problems promptly and work toward eliminating occupational injuries and illnesses.

Merck believes there are many benefits to this approach. First, health is a key ingredient for optimal workforce performance. Whether at work or at home, sickness or injury often can affect a person’s ability to perform and contribute effectively. Because our business is health, we believe we must lead by example. We also believe that a constructive approach to employee health helps to recruit and retain top talent.

Finally, understanding what health issues most affect Merck’s workforce can help us make the right investments to improve the health of our people.

Since environmental, health and safety (EHS) matters are closely connected, we manage them collaboratively across numerous functions. A key element of our EHS management system is the monitoring of health and safety risks and performance. Health and safety performance is an important consideration in our annual assessment of scorecard performance, which is tied to compensation.

In this section, we provide data on Employee Health and Employee Safety.