Clare Forshaw
Professional Head of Health and Wellbeing, RSSB
Building infrastructure, buying rolling stock, adopting technology—in the business of rail, doing more costs more money.
What about increasing the frequency of staff medical assessments? Surely, that costs more too.
But in fact, emerging research is revealing a counter-intuitive truth.
By increasing how often we offer medical checks for frontline staff, we can actually save money.
Closing the gap
The industry asked RSSB to investigate if our assessment intervals were truly optimised, so we commissioned the Institute of Occupational Medicine to research the issue.
Their initial findings, supported by data from Australia and Canada, suggest our current window is too wide.
For non-driver safety-critical roles, the gap between medical assessments is 10 years. We are exploring the benefits of tightening that window to 6 years.
Health doesn't fail overnight. Conditions like Type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and sleep apnoea develop incrementally. But a 10-year gap allows these issues to become chronic and irreversible. A 6-year gap could create more chances for early intervention and preventative advice—and less impact on the industry, both organisational and financial.
Overcoming the misconception
The logistical challenges of this change are, of course, plain. More medicals can mean more off-site travel or time away from home. They can mean time away from the job, more lost working days, and a strain on a limited pool of rail-specific doctors.
But poor health means unscheduled sickness absence, emergency shift cover, and disruptions. It also means the worker may no longer be able to do their safety-critical role.
So, time spent on a check-up can actually be viewed as an investment, a proactive step to catch an issue early. But a working day lost or an incident caused by sudden ill health is a disruptive, uncontrolled issue which may become a long-term problem with cost implications.
The treatment plan
As we enter a new era under Great British Railways, we are going through a time of great change. But it is also a time of great opportunity: to design a system where we share resources, standardise care, and put the health of our people first. Actions to get us there are already under way. With the help of industry, we are launching a consultation to review industry standards in the coming months. We’re improving the competence and availability of medical providers.
Finally, a new Train Driver Medical Advisory Panel is being established, to ensure decisions are led by clinical expertise.
A healthier workforce is a more efficient and available workforce. It’s time to stop viewing medicals as a cost and start seeing them as an investment in safety, efficiency, and most of all, people. And it’s a course of action that will, ultimately, save the industry money.