Dan Basacik
RSSB
Dan is a Lead Human Factors Specialist at the Rail Safety and Standards Board - RSSB - in London. Prior to RSSB, he worked at the UK’s Transport Research Laboratory. In his time at RSSB Dan has worked on projects to do with signals passed at danger, passenger safety at station platforms and road user behaviour at level crossings. His focus in recent years has been on getting good human factors data from incident investigations. He has recently been tasked with scoping and developing RSSB’s human factors work on the topic of fatigue and alertness.
The Safety Management Intelligence System (SMIS) is the rail industry’s national database for recording safety-related events that occur on the rail network in Britain. Each year, over 80,000 incidents from slips, trips and... [ view full abstract ]
The Safety Management Intelligence System (SMIS) is the rail industry’s national database for recording safety-related events that occur on the rail network in Britain. Each year, over 80,000 incidents from slips, trips and falls through to major incidents are recorded in SMIS. A large programme of work was undertaken to update and modernise the system and this has provided the opportunity to integrate SMIS and the Incident Factor Classification System (IFCS).
The IFCS is a database used to record and classify human and system failures associated with railway incidents. The Human Factors team at RSSB takes a selection of incident investigation reports to review in order to identify and classify the associated causes using the database. These data can then be analysed and special topic reports can be produced to allow better information to be provided to the rail industry on the causes and underlying factors related to specific types of incident, operational areas, etc.
As part of the work to integrate SMIS and the IFCS, the classification system is being revised. The result will be a Classification System which is easier to use, allowing people who carry out investigations to record and classify the incident causes that they identify themselves. This will increase the amount and quality of data that is available to help the industry to understand and manage risk.
A number of activities were undertaken to understand which categories in the classification system needed to be refined. Initially, a review of the data in the IFCS that has already been classified was conducted to identify categories that have not been used as defined, have not been used reliably, or which have been used to capture a range of issues. Following this, interviews with users of the current classification system were conducted to understand their experiences, including aspects that are difficult or easy to use, and suggestions for improvement. A review of different classification systems, such as the Human Factors and Analysis Classification System (HFACS) for aviation, was also conducted.
An iterative approach to designing and testing the revised classification system and support materials then followed, and also included an exercise to map existing classification categories to the new ones being proposed. This iterative process included a series of trials with human factors specialists, incident investigators, and other potential future users of the classification system. Data and feedback was used to refine the classification system throughout this process. The final round of testing has not yet taken place.
This paper will outline the key changes that have been made to the classification system.
Systems ergonomics , Systems safety, risk management and incident reporting , Accident and incident investigation
