Safety improvements in rail have been driven by cross-industry data collection, monitoring, and public reporting. The Office of Rail and Road (ORR) is encouraging a similar data-led approach for health. By treating health like safety, we can unlock similar improvements to rail’s activities, standards, decision-making, and culture.

The costs

The costs of impaired health are estimated to be £889 million yearly. Therefore, there is a strong business case for a cross-industry dashboard to facilitate targeted investment in health and wellbeing. The estimated cost savings in the first five years are £65 million. 

The benefits

  • Collating health and wellbeing data will help us identify health risks in the industry and assess which are a priority. 
  • With better data, we can make business cases for health interventions and track the improvements they bring.
  • Having cross-industry benchmarking allows companies to compare their health risk profiles with similar firms. We can create benchmarking groups and share good practice.
  • Using a common language and having a clear direction of improvement can facilitate audit processes (for example, by health inspectors from the ORR).
  • Companies can use approved measures and systems rather than creating their own from scratch, saving resources.
  • Health and wellbeing risk ‘hot spots’ and profiles within organisations and sectors will become clear. This helps us decide what interventions and investment we should prioritise.
  • Data allowing rapid risk assessments can help us respond to health crises such as Covid-19. This could include the number of staff with underlying health conditions, absences, and regional risk profiles.
  • Sharing data can help us treat health and wellbeing performance on a par with safety through public reporting.

The first steps to success

In this video GTR’s Jamie Blower discusses how they developed, implemented, and realised the benefits of a health dashboard.

Creating a platform

There is currently no industry data system to report, monitor, and benchmark health and wellbeing among rail staff. Nor is there a common system that can be used at the organisation level. We need to create a data system to unlock these benefits and meet the objectives in the Rail Health and Safety Strategy (RHSS) and ORR’s Risk Management Maturity Model (RM3).

A long-term data strategy is already in place to help the industry manage health and wellbeing on a par with safety.