RESTRAIL partners contributed to a special session on evaluation of preventative measures for railway fatalities at the Fourth International Rail Human Factors Conference in London, 5 – 7 March 2013.
Brendan Ryan (University of Nottingham, UK) presented an overview of the process that has been developed within RESTRAIL for the evaluation of a wide range of preventative measures for suicide and trespass which are known to be used across EU Member States. Jean-Marie Burkhardt (IFSTTAR, France) presented results from the application of the methodology, identifying a shortlist of measures for implementation and testing in a later phase of RESTRAIL. Future challenges for evaluation of selected preventative measures in the field tests in RESTRAIL were discussed.
The session was planned to strengthen links with other researchers in this area of work and to exchange ideas for the evaluation of the success of preventative measures in this type of railway context. Dione Hills (Tavistock Institute, UK) presented a review of the evaluation strategy options and described features of the Network Rail/Samaritans programme for tackling suicide, before outlining the evaluation strategy that is being adopted in Great Britain for this programme. Anne Mills (RSSB) provided an overview of the numbers of railway fatalities in Great Britain.
The special session attracted interest from a broad range of countries (e.g. UK, Sweden, Switzerland, Israel and US), enabling dissemination of the goals of the RESTRAIL project to a wider audience and engagement of human factors and safety experts in discussion about methodology and results that have been obtained in the project to date.
This is the fourth of a series of Rail Human Factors Conferences that have been arranged jointly by the University of Nottingham, RSSB and Network Rail, since 2003. The conference was attended by researchers and practitioners from 24 countries, with delegates from 18 European countries and further afield from Australia, Hong Kong, Israel, Japan, Korea and the United States. Conference sessions focused on a wide range of human factors topics (e.g. human reliability, fatigue, safety culture, human factors integration, competence and incident investigation) and included opportunities for industrial visits to the London Underground Control Centre and Training Centre.
Further information on RESTRAIL is available at www.RESTRAIL.eu or on the conference at http://www.railhf2013.org/Pages/home.aspx
