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Project number: 2022-SSH-024

Making health and safety data easier to find and analyse


This project developed three PowerBI safety data hubs to make it easier for the Rail Health and Safety Strategy risk groups access and interact with data about their topics.
'The dashboards offer clearly presented information. It is easier to find the information I need now.'
Anonymous
SPAD data hub user

The challenge

Data is essential for making the railway safer and more efficient. The Safety Management Intelligence System collates data from the whole industry so that everyone benefits. However, data hubs for specific safety issues would make it easier for members to access the data and analyses they need.

Safety data hubs needed to focus on:

  • Signals Passed at Danger (SPADs)
  • Passenger operations
  • Freight
  • Level crossings.
What we did

To help members get the most value from safety data, RSSB improved the ways of accessing and interacting with it. RSSB also produced new analytical tools to help probe the data for insights.

These improvements included:

  • Safety data that is easier to access and interact with through PowerBI data hubs. These provide a coherent set of metrics that link to the high-level RSSB Board metrics and threshold tests.
  • More up to date trends in comparison to current quarterly reporting for more timely decisions about safety.
  • Including more signalling images in the information about SPADs
  • Removing the need for Network Rail to maintain a separate website about SPADs, saving them around £10,000 a year..
Benefits delivered

The new safety data hubs improve the ability of industry to make decisions about safety. The data hubs have been rolled out through the relevant RHSS risk groups and can be used by other member organisations too.

The benefits of this work include:

  • Better cross-industry safety based on more robust data and decisions.
  • The ability to explore more up-to-date data, and apply some data manipulation to identify safety insights, will strengthen the RHSS risk groups.
  • Modernised intelligence offering from RSSB. This also aligns RSSB’s reporting and data management activity with the RHSS risk groups.
  • Risk and Safety Intelligence experts at RSSB can build their skills in PowerBI so that support to members can be improved.