SPAD Good Practice Guide

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.

• Report: Managing SPAD risk in a period of change
• Article: How to use the SPAD toolbox
• Document: SPAD Toolbox (driver-focussed techniques)
• Article: Cut your SPAD risk from home
• Article: Staying in 'the zone'
• Non-technical skills pages
• Risk Triggered Commentary
• 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
RIS: Appendix B - RIS-8040-TOM Iss 1- Low Adhesion between the Wheel and the Rail - Managing the Risk

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
• One-track mind: Non-Technical Skills in rail network controllers

Getting the most from your SPAD investigations is critical to changes being made that permanently reduces 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:  Identifying the underlying causes of SPADS
• Article:  SPAD Investigation Report Template

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
• Article:  SPAD Notices, Guidance, and Templates
• Guidance: ECS SPADS data analysis, recommendations, and strategies
• Report: SPADs and post-qualified drivers

SPAD data ‘deep-dives’ are increasingly being used to understand changing patterns in SPAD risk, this topic looks at various examples at company and industry levels.

•   Article: Summer SPADs – Deep Dive 2022  
•   Article:  Looking at Precursors to Anticipate SPAD Risk
•   Article:  SPAD Data insights

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.

Article: Evaluating SPAD management
Tool: SPAD Self-Evaluation Toolkit