Ten minutes with...
Network Rail’s Safety Improvement Specialist, Caitriona O’Brien
Caitriona O’BrienNetwork Rail’s Safety Improvement Specialist
In November 2020, my world changed in such a way that I thought I would never recover. My 46-year-old partner Jon died suddenly of a stroke caused by high blood pressure. Although I had experienced loss before, it was never on this scale. Our whole life together came to a sudden stop, and so did the future we had planned. I really struggled to get back on my feet. However, I had to find a way to honour Jon, and Jon was a helper. When I came back to work in February 2021, I realised how difficult it can be for people to talk about grief. It makes people uncomfortable, and as a result it makes the grieving person feel isolated and unable to share what they are feeling.
I am not a marathon runner, so I knew honouring Jon was never going to involve that kind of activity. Instead, I set up a bereavement support group so that grieving people could speak to each other and find empathy and support from others in the same situation. The group quickly spread and is now the Rail Industry Bereavement Support Group, available to anyone who works in rail. It doesn’t have rules apart from respecting religious beliefs, punctuality, being unapologetic about showing emotion. Sometimes we cry together. Sometimes we laugh. That’s grief.
I started talking about grief and grieving and the need to be met with empathy from colleagues and line managers. I wrote a number of webinars and now offer them to anyone who would like to start a conversation on grief in their team or business. They cover things like managing someone through grief; the return to work; grief awareness; and grief allyship. I have delivered them across various teams at Network Rail and also to Rail Delivery Group, Hitachi, EDI Charter for Rail, and others.
The more these conversations progressed, and the more I carried on with my work on fatigue, the more I realised that grief, or anything that can make someone feel excluded or isolated, is a safety issue. Psychological safety means feeling safe to take interpersonal risks, to speak up, to disagree openly, to surface concerns without fear of repercussion or pressure to be different. When we had a near miss and the investigation showed that the person involved had been bereaved, I began to champion the need for everyone to be treated with empathy at work.
Empathy is often misunderstood. People think you are either empathetic or not, which is not the case. Empathy can be taught, can be learned, just like other leadership skills. It was from RSSB that I first heard the phrase ‘people-centred rail’, and it’s a phrase I use a lot now and an ideal that I champion. If everyone could be treated as an individual, with demands and feelings, and be met with empathy when it is needed, I feel the railway would be a much safer place to be.
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