Putting health and wellbeing at the top of the agenda
We recognise the rail environment exposes employees to factors that affect both mental and physical health. Employees’ health and wellbeing are really important to us, so we are supporting this year’s Rail Wellbeing Live event and presenting at numerous sessions.
Sessions submitted by RSSB cover stress, preventing and managing back pain, revolutionising fatigue risk management, designing jobs for mental health, healthy culture and the health and wellbeing dashboard. Some of the topics discussed may be long-established but new data or new approaches can help improve wellbeing in these areas. Other topics are more recent but still show valuable ways to improve wellbeing.
Stress is well-known within rail as an issue that needs better management, and to do that you need to be able to recognise its signs and symptoms and understand how to manage it. Dr Edward Bebb, Professional Head of Health and Wellbeing at RSSB, will join two other industry experts to unpack the practical steps everyone needs to manage stress. The breadth of this session makes it particularly useful. It will help you to manage your own stress. It will also help you if you’re in a supporting role with others who are suffering from stress whether at home or at work.
Back pain is a cause of significant ill-health within the rail industry. Ill health estimates extrapolated from Network Rail data reveal that you are 13 times more likely to take a day off sick with a bad back than following a workforce-related accident. However, myths about managing and preventing back pain persist, so neither individual employees nor the industry as a whole are getting the most from current best practice. The Musculoskeletal Disorders Group of the Rail Wellbeing Alliance will discuss the most recent evidence about what works and how to apply that in rail.
Fatigue is long-established as a critical area for wellbeing and can be a contributor to serious accidents. However, because it has been recognised for so long approaches to it can themselves be ‘a bit tired’. Following the Sandilands tram crash in 2016 in which seven people died, First Tram Operations Ltd completely revised its approach to fatigue. Its story is inspiring and provides many insights that could help other train operators.
New topics to improve wellbeing
Rail Wellbeing Live will also showcase three more recent approaches: designing better jobs for mental health; developing a ‘healthy culture’ and using data to monitor and improve health and wellbeing.
Joana Faustino, Lead Work Psychologist, and her colleague Dr Greg Morse, Operational Feedback Lead, both at RSSB, will be talking about how to design jobs that are better for employees’ mental health. Given that rail is preparing for other highly significant changes, now could be the ideal time to take this approach. They will discuss what is and isn’t known about this approach using examples from rail.
The term ‘healthy culture’ is used to describe an organisation’s culture when ‘the healthy choice becomes the easy choice’. This sounds like a very effective way to improve the wellbeing of everyone in rail but organisational cultures can be very resistant to change. This makes the development of a healthy culture quite a challenge. The session on healthy culture is designed to help organisations recognise potential obstacles preventing the establishment of a healthy culture and design their own roadmap towards success. It will include practical examples from the rail industry.
Last but not least is a session on the new dashboard for collecting and using data about rail employees’ health. This will enable rail organisations to analyse employee health and wellbeing data to assess wellbeing activities and programmes. The dashboard can also be used to provide benchmarks for performance relative to similar companies or national data.
All these sessions show RSSB applying its expertise to solve practical wellbeing problems for the whole railway. Whatever your particular wellbeing challenges Rail Wellbeing Live is bound to have a free online session that will help.
