The UIC Safety Platform is about to publish the final reports of two studies (around 10 pages each) carried out by its Human Factors Working Group under the leadership of C. Neveu (SNCF, chairman of the group) with the kind and helpful support of G.-L. Marini.

One of these studies addresses the “Management safety checks”. It is widely recognised that the front line manager (or however he may be called, the person in charge of checking the operators’ way of working) is a key person for safety. Among his prominent roles, checking compliance with the legal and regulatory obligations in his domain is one of the most influential on system safety.

The study is based on a benchmarking among UIC members who have volunteered to participate. The first part of the final report describes the variety of processes of checking safety compliance. The second part proposes a short set of recommendations for efficient safety checking at front line managers level.

The other study deals with “Contribution of psychology to railway operation safety”. It is also based on a benchmarking among UIC members.

The report goes through several fields of railway operations where psychology and psychologists may be helpful. It describes very briefly the narrower or wider use of psychology made by the companies involved in the study. It ranges from areas where psychology is very common (recruitment) to areas where the psychologists’ proposals for support have not been yet widely been put to good use.

As a conclusion it recommends the development of use of psychology in three areas: incident and accident analysis, management and operational staff training and change management.
They will be available free of charge mid December 2010 in French (original), English and German.