Having a workforce naturally implies risks: the start of every working day means responsibilities for employers. But few industries are more risk-prone than oil and gas exploration and extraction. Yet despite the often remote and dangerous hiding places of fossil fuels, and the complex web of social issues that result, every oil and gas employee needs and deserves the same level of safety as the CEO.

Oil Search is at the vanguard in recognising the importance of protecting its people. Woven into the fabric of the company over the past 15 years is an ethos that extends health and safety further and deeper into the company than anything required by law. Incident-free operation is standard operating procedure.

It falls to Oil Search Health to provide the medical and wellbeing services that the company needs. This department provides a dizzying array of services. Key sites are in remote locations in Papua New Guinea, requiring a comprehensive public health and clinical medicine service to be established there (including a transportable medical service for exploration missions). Wellbeing, fitness and healthy eating programmes are implemented across the company.

Oil Search's relationship with the community is similarly impressive and the services provided by Oil Search Health benefit the community as well as its people. Large areas of Papua New Guinea are now malaria-free thanks to the company's world-leading malaria control programmes, and the clinical and wellbeing programmes benefit the communities and local employees and their families.

Oil Search Health is a complex department critical to the organisation, but with a very low profle. Explaining and promoting Oil Search Health's work to the organisation (and stakeholders) was recognised as an important step in furthering the success of the department. With the right information and trust established between the department and the rest of the organisation, its programmes would be more readily taken up and the relationship further improved.

Such an impressive socal and health profile is a daunting communications brief to live up to; finding a way to promote and explain this comprehensive, yet complex, service could not be a straightforward process.

The department needed its own brand to give it recognition, but could not lose its identity as part of a bigger organisation. The ideal branding would be immediately recognisable as being part of Oil Search Health, and of Oil Search as well. The three lines chosen for the headline of every document echo the company's corporate logo.

Stylistically, this could not be your standard 'corporate brochure.' Presenting the realities of difficult and dangerous medicine and disease control programmes asked for a sensitive approach but one which didn't glosss over the truth. "Medicine is a messy business," explains the General Manager of Oil Search Health.

Our Art Director and Copywriter created a style of presentation to reflect this. Using a reportage style similar to international journals such as Colors Magazine allowed us to deliver concise factual copy as if 'from the front line', bypassing a corporate style altogether. Much of the imagery was taken by amateur photographers in the field, so our non-corporate style was the perfect vehicle for these less than perfect, but beautifully honest, images.

An Oil Search Health Information Pack formed the centrepiece of the campaign. The kit acts like a quick reference pack for any employee who travels as part of their work with Oil Search. The pack contains straight forward and concise information on various diseases which are commonplace in operating locations and emergency contact detail cards which can be detached and kept on-hand. Risk management and creative communication were here working hand-in-hand.

It's been a great pleasure for Straight Media to work with Oil Search Health, as we value the respect they have for their people and their communities.

KEY PEOPLE

Art Director: Tony Homan
Copywriter: Sue Carey

FURTHER INFORMATION

Oil Search company website