Human factors: the jewel in Merseyrail’s safety strategy
We spoke with Lynne Cleworth, Merseyrail’s Head of Safety, about the work they’re doing in human factors to improve staff safety and customer satisfaction.
Lynne CleworthHead of Safety, Merseyrail
Education, engagement, and empowerment are important values in the rail industry. This is particularly so when it comes to upholding safety. We sat down with Lynne Cleworth, Head of Safety at Merseyrail, to find out how they’re maintaining their strong culture of safety through human factors work.
Congratulations on 10 years at Merseyrail! How have you helped shape the organisation’s safety culture during that time?
Thank you! I started at Merseyrail as a Safety Business Advisor before becoming the Underground Area Manager, then the Head of Safety.During my time here, we’ve delivered a programme of behavioural safety to our management and frontline teams. This focused on increasing individual feelings of accountability and ability to control risk. So, it gave our employees a different perspective to safety than the traditional technical safety training.
We wanted both to ensure that they showed safer behaviours and to deter risk-taking activity. It was also an opportunity to educate employees on the difference between errors and violations, which was crucial to underpinning our transition to a ‘just culture’.
Are there any other internal initiatives that encourage employees to uphold Merseyrail’s high safety standards?
Working closely with our health and safety representatives, we’ve created an employee ‘safety code’. We recognise that employees are expected to know and follow many rules within our safety management system. So, to simplify the application of these rules, we identified six key elements to form the code. These are designed to mitigate the key safety risks our employees face day-to-day. They’re encouraged and empowered to adhere to them to stay safe.
More recently, we’ve launched a ‘Choose to challenge’ campaign with our senior leaders, including our rolling stock maintainer. This is to encourage frontline teams to engage in safety conversations to challenge unsafe acts. We wanted to drive positive safety behaviours in the depot, and the campaign has already resulted in a reduction of incidents.
Merseyrail is doing interesting work in human factors, specifically around operational safety. Can you tell us about those projects? What’s the end goal?
We’re in the midst of a significant change after the introduction of our new fleet of trains. While the new fleet has dramatically improved our overall safety profile, it has introduced new risks for our train crew, as their working environment has changed.
So, we’ve engaged RSSB to undertake a review of the interface arrangements between drivers, the cab display, and controls. The intention is to prevent operational incidents. In turn, this will ensure a safe working environment for train crew and help protect our passengers.
Fatigue is one area you’re looking into as part of that work, but it can be something that rail workers shy away from discussing. What’s your take on that?
Working on the railway isn’t a 9 to 5 job, and we know people have commitments outside of work, so it’s important to recognise the impact that shift work can have on rail employees.
Not managing fatigue can lead to errors, accidents, ill-health, and injury. With that in mind, we’ve done an independent assessment of our rosters to ensure that we comply with the Office of Rail and Road (ORR) fatigue factors requirements.
We’ve also established a Fatigue Risk Management Group. And we’re partnering with our health and safety and wellbeing representatives to regularly communicate with our employees on managing their lifestyle to reduce fatigue. We have incorporated roadshows focusing on sleep, diet, exercise, and mental health to help support and educate employees about fatigue.
In addition, we’ve added fatigue as a key area within our 2024 Safety Strategy. This is to ensure that all aspects of fatigue are managed and that everyone understands their role in doing so. This will involve the delivery of a bespoke training package to empower our employees to declare instances where they feel fatigued.
With your new fleet now in operation, what did Merseyrail do to identify and mitigate the risks that new trains can pose?
Throughout the process, we have had excellent engagement with our health and safety representatives, who have been involved in testing and commissioning, reviewing risk assessments, and training.
To ensure a smooth transition:
We’ve worked with independent consultants and delivered hazard identification (HAZID) workshops with reps from all functions, including Network Rail, Merseyside Fire and Rescue, Merseytravel, and our train maintainer Stadler.
We have a suite of sufficient risk assessments following the identification of risks in the HAZID workshops.
We’ve used the bowtie risk model to assess the risk relating to our independently powered electric multiple unit trains, which are the first of their kind on the UK network. This has resulted in the introduction of a thermal incident management plan.
We’ve used RSSB’s Taking Safe Decisions model to assess the risk of fire in the underground stations.
Also, we’ve engaged with other operators who have introduced a new fleet of trains to share best practice and learning. We’ve applied this to our introduction. We’re also planning a multi-agency joint emergency exercise to test our arrangements and recovery plans in the event of an incident.
Good change management is also key at a time like this. Do you have any advice for senior leaders on managing an organisation or project through a time of change?
Good, transparent communication is essential. It can be easy to rush ahead and progress a project. But the people the change impacts the most need to be kept updated and given the opportunity to share their thoughts and concerns.
There are multiple key players within any project of scale. All need to be aligned to ensure a safe delivery. For example, when we introduced our new fleet, we found it helped to run ‘depot surgeries’ to allow our frontline teams to provide feedback and ask questions. This also helped the senior leadership team understand and appreciate the challenges of the change.
Merseyrail’s passenger numbers continue to grow, and passenger accidents are at an all-time low. What went into this, and how can you maintain it?
When I started here, passenger accidents were at an all-time high. So, we did a data review, and this revealed that:
Those over 60 are more likely to have an accident.
Escalators were our key risk area (though this was on an upward trajectory).
Those findings led to the introduction of rail support staff who are employed to identify vulnerable passengers and support them on our worst performing escalators. This ultimately led to a decrease in the number of accidents.
It’s also important for us to communicate with passengers on safe travel. With this in mind, we organise regular roadshows that deliver key messaging, such as ‘Stand to the right and hold on tight’ (for escalators). Also, following passenger feedback — in which they told us they were unlikely to seek assistance when needed — we introduced our unique ‘Tulip’ scheme. Now, if a passenger is wearing the Tulip on our network, it signifies to our staff that they’ll accept help.
It’s fantastic to see these measures contributing to reduced passenger accident numbers. We continue to strive to reduce harm on our network and have various initiatives planned to continue raising awareness of the help that’s available to travellers.
Thank you. Finally, what’s your parting message to our rail leader readers?
I’m very fortunate to be surrounded by safety-conscious colleagues from Merseyrail’s executive leadership, Transport UK and Serco, and our safety, engineering, operations, and stations teams. We also have a fantastic group of health and safety representatives. They share the views of our frontline employees and have worked with us tirelessly to find solutions to our problems.
Cross-functional engagement with managers, colleagues, and representatives is critical to running a safe railway. Working in rail provides a vast pool of knowledge, and we need to continue to share information to allow us to mature and move forward. We can’t work efficiently in isolation.
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