By Jennifer Perry
This was the topic which senior rail operators addressed in the panel discussion held on the second day of the Rail Safety conference, in Sydney on February 27th. The members of the panel comprised Mike Carter (executive general manager, QR Network) Leon Welsby (senior advisor to the CEO, ARTC) Vivienne King (acting group general manager, service delivery, RailCorp) and Andrew Thomas (national industrial research officer, Rail, Tram and Bus Union, RTBU).
In opening, Mike Carter provided a QR context for the topic:
Safety has always been one of our highest priorities the thing thats changed in the last year or so…is we want to take it to a new level…the QR goal is to move people in terms of the way we look at safety to a completely different paradigm to a place where we would regard our organisation as world class.
He commented that QR does not currently regard itself as world class in terms of safety, but that many of its bulk customers are.
Many of them have safety records compared to our workplace health and safety records to envy many of them in order of magnitude are better than the rail industry as a whole and better than QR.
Carter said that any cultural change in an organisation does not occur unless the leader and the leadership team are on board – it is just lip service unless that occurs.
Leon Welsby opened in saying that safety versus operational outcome is not a competition in any organisation.
Outcomes do not result in a denigration or degradation of safety.
At the end of the day, a worker has…the expectation to come to work and then go home having finished his or her day and having not been harmed and thats the culture we breed in our organisation.
Welsby went on to talk about technology as a future enabler of safety improvements.
Lets put to bed one fallacy: new technology to replace current train control technology is not as expensive as current train control technology, as a matter of fact its about one third the cost of replacing life for life technology.
Not only that, ingrained in the new technology is a thing called intervention that in the event of a train that looks like exceeding its authority…the train is automatically braked, which doesnt occur now.
Vivienne King believes that when it comes to safety versus operational output, one cant happen without the other: If you have the operational output without the safety framework its not worth having…An effective operational environment will have an inherent safety framework.
Customers and stakeholders within our area have the right to expect a safe, reliable and efficient railway.
King said RailCorp is people- as well as systems-focused, and as CEO she uses RailCorps safety management framework to focus on customers, staff behaviours and the provision of clarity, responsibility and accountability.
Andrew Thomas took a strong stand on the topic. While he believes that generally, employers put more emphasis on safety than they may have done ten years ago, In a practical sense, from our experience there is a tension between safety and operational output – thats absolutely the case, and where that tension gives, in our view, is that safety comes a distant second.
He said that while you often hear the phrase, Our employees and their safety and that of the public are our number one priority in the rail and other industries, In our view theres plenty of evidence to suggest that that comment isextremely contestable, in many cases doubtful.
To read the second part of this report from the recent Rail Safety conference, read next weeks Rail Express Newswire.
