SPAD Good Practice Guide

As a train driver, you have a crucial part in reducing SPAD risk. Driving a train is a safety critical role that takes commitment, responsibility and focus. You can take steps to reduce the risk of operational incidents, including managing your lifestyle outside of work, arriving to work prepared, and being aware of how you can improve in areas such as attention management and communication.

• Article:  Cut your SPAD risk from home
• Article:  Staying in 'the zone'
• Article:  ‘Are you sure’ miscommunication and SPADs
• Article:  Stepping Up SPAD Focus
• Article: Mitigating against empty coaching stock SPADs

Reviews of over 250 SPADs help pin-point the competence management issues and enables targeted improvements to be made.  An article on competence development planning should help make sure your drivers are fully supported.

• Article:  Competence development and skill enhancement plans
• Article:  Optimising competence management to address SPAD risk

A recent review of SPAD risk underlines the importance of managing change and the need to avoid unintended consequences.

Article: Managing SPADs during operational and engineering change

Article: Improving Management of Multi-SPAD Signals

Articles here look at the role others such as the signaller, dispatcher and guard in preventing SPADs. We have a look at the topic of spoken safety critical communications as this is a key skills across all operational roles.

• Article:  Signallers Avoiding Unnecessary Stop Aspects
• Article:  SPADs and Safety Critical Communications
• Article:  Train Dispatch and Preventing Start Against Signal SPADs

Articles aimed at drivers and their managers to help reduce errors leading to SPADs, covering: lifestyle, staying in ‘the zone’ whilst driving and safety critical communications.

• Article:  SPAD Investigation Report Template
• Article:  Looking at Precursors to Anticipate SPAD Risk
• Article:  Investigating SPADs - Four things to remember
• Article:  Blockers and enablers to learning from SPAD investigations
• Article:  Getting to the bottom of a SPAD incident
• Article:  Getting to the underlying causes of SPADs

Well-managed and properly supported drivers are vital to how we manage SPAD risk.  A fresh look at research and good practice around driver management will help us make sure that we can best support drivers to prevent SPADs and how to learn from them when they do happen.

• Article:  Developing your driver management skills
• Article:  Enabling professional driving
• Article:  Decisions made after SPADs
• Article:  Learning from SPADs

At the end of March 2020, the annual number of SPADs was the highest it had been for 15 years. In response, RSSB’s data insights team analysed data from various sources to understand the possible causes of this rise and to inform SPAD risk management going forward.

This tool looks at SPAD management from several perspectives. Users can consider how the potential for SPADs are managed by the influence of driver managers, through competence management and during times of change, the impact of other operational roles and the actions of the driver, as well as tackling the causes of SPADs.