Safety management railway industry

In their interactions with the company the Inspectorate appeared to be hierarchical. So although inspectors interacted with the workforce, their negotiations were, in their view necessarily, with management. They did try to talk to safety representatives but with variable success. Indeed they were vitally concerned with the everyday compliance of everyone in the company and they did place much emphasis upon the company s structures for self-regulation (see Ch. 6). What cannot be gleaned from this discussion is whether or not these objectives were understood by those in the industry and whether or not they affected health and safety in the railway industry, so let us now turn our attention to how much was known about the regulatory apparatus put in place by the state to enforce occupational health and safety laws. 

Respondents main focus seems to have been upon the major accidents and evidently opinions differed about the acceptability of these I suppose it s a lot but there again taking the people they got about I don t suppose it s all that many really (worker, interviewee 65). Directors and departmental safety managers considered that in absolute terms there were either too many or a lot of accidents on the railway. But this was qualified by two in this group who believed that the numbers were few relative to the size of the workforce, the twenty-four hour nature of the industry, and the environment within which the workforce operated. ... 

In addition, the research programme is investigating policy issues in safety management and the governance of the railway industry. It is these policy issues that are the subject of this paper. 

First developed for the nuclear and aerospace industries. Safety Cases can be used in any activity or industry that poses high risk to workers or the community. One of the first examples was in the United Kingdom where the Nuclear Installations Act of 1965 that required covered facilities to create and maintain a Safety Case in order to obtain a license to operate. Since that time other industries that have used Safety Cases include pipelines, railways, and mining operations. Moreover, in spite of the fact that the term Safety Case is not widely used in the United States, the same approach to the development and application of Safety Management Systems is, in fact, used in other American industries. For example, the U.S. nuclear and space industries prepare Safety Analysis Reports (SARs) and Mission Safety Evaluations (MSEs), respectively. These documents have the same general intent and strucmre as a Safety Case. Within the onshore process... 

The scope of this research includes engineering safety analysis and management that is applicable to any industry, but with the trial implementation being specific to the railway industry. The methodology aims to support the systems safety analysis and the identification of major contributors to safety risks and benefits, whilst safety and business decision-making is supported through the evaluation of different... 

This situation need not be. The use of computers allows the designer to build in more functionality leading to improved safety. To do this the suppliers of systems need to recognise the pitfalls inherent in poor software, particularly where safety is an issue, and adopt better practices in line with the work of the lEC or CENELEC. The Railway Industry needs to recognise the need for effective software management and the assessment of the associated safety issues. 

The process of certification, based on examination and course work, which was introduced with the safety management training as a contribution to the demonstration of competence has proved so popular that a parallel procedure was introduced on the Project Control training the following year as part of a BR qualify initiative. The vision of this quality initiative is to support the individual s demonstration of their competence to manage a railway project by way of certificated training in the skills essential to the industry (see Figure 1). 

Safety and risk management research in healthcare has adopted as its dominant trend the systems oriented approach, modelled largely on previous research in safely critical industries such as aviation and nuclear power. The systems view entails that the focus is not primarily on the mechanisms of individual human error but on the factors that shape human performance (Rasmussen 1986 Reason 1993,1997). In an organisational context, such factors are, of course, those that are within the control of the organisation. For instance, it has been suggested that quahty and safety are affected not only by operators professional and technical competence and skills, but also by their attitudes to and perceptions of their job roles, their organisation and management (Helmreich and Merritt 1998). Such employee attitudes and views are important elements which shape safety cirlture - and its related notion safety climate . Indeed, survey studies have shown that staff attitudes are important indices of safety performance not only in human-machine system domains such as railway operations and constmction (e.g. Itoh and Andersen 1999 Itoh et al. 2004 Silva et al. 2004) but also in healthcare (e.g. Colla et al. 2005 Itoh and Andersen 2010). 

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