Reaping the benefits – How railways can build on lessons learned from Crew Resource Management

Abstract

Recent accidents and incidents in the Australian rail industry have highlighted a need to improve the ‘non-technical skills’ of rail safety workers. These include specific behavioural competencies such as team communication and co-ordination, planning and contingency management, critical decision-making, situational awareness, and workload management. Although rail safety workers are provided with adequate technical and procedural training, there has been comparatively little focus on those non-technical skills that enable operational staff such as drivers, guards, train controllers, signallers and track workers to effectively manage hazards and errors in the workplace. Programs to address such skills were originally developed in the aviation industry and are widely known as ’Crew Resource Management‘ training (CRM). The Independent Transport Safety and Reliability Regulator of New South Wales (ITSRR) and Public Transport Safety Victoria (PTSV) have conducted, in partnership with the rail industry, a national project to develop an applied Human Factors CRMbased package (Rail Resource Management, or RRM) that draws on the experience and learnings from other industries and adapts them to the Australian rail environment. To ensure that the program would be appropriately customised to the needs of the Australian rail industry, considerable research, analysis and consultation with stakeholders was undertaken. The project deliverables included a best practice review, RRM Guidelines, and a generic training toolkit. The RRM Guidelines and training toolkit were officially launched at the end of 2007. While the development part of the project is complete, ongoing work is required to market the guidelines and toolkit to industry and raise awareness. Future activities will see a rail transport operator pilot RRM training in their organisation. This paper broadly describes the program and discusses the lessons learned from its development and implementation in the Australian rail industry.