1. RSSB Fatigue Projects
Presentation for Track Safety Alliance Staff Reps Conference
3rd February 2015
© RSSB 3 Feb 2015

2. Fatigue
A feeling of extreme tiredness and being unable to perform work effectively
Shift system:
Start time
Shift length
Rotation
Rest period
Recovery time
Breaks
Job factors:
Workload
Working environment
Task familiarity
Individual:
Age
Body clock
Personality
Fitness
Domestic arrangements
General description of fatigue, the factors that affect our experience of fatigue and the effects of fatigue on human performance. Emphasise that it is an experience that differs quite significantly between individuals. We’re also beginning to understand the importance of the relationship between the individual and their work in the experience of fatigue. The experience of fatigue is likely to be delayed to a degree if you really feel ‘in your element’ at work.
Impaired vigilance, decision-making, concentration, alertness, reaction times, memory, mood & motivation

3. Estimated cost to the industry+
Approx. £2 million per annum
Safety risk
£?? per annum
Absenteeism & ill health
It’s very hard to calculate the cost to industry from fatigue because the data is very sketchy. We know that fatigue contributes to human error and therefore safety incidents. We also know that fatigue is associated with short term absences from work, as well as long term health issues. Our analysts have been hard at work making some sensible estimates based on data from our industry and others, and they have arrived at a figure of £2.3 million per year purely in terms of railway safety risk.
The effect of fatigue on absenteeism and ill health is even more difficult to quantify, but our analysts think this figure is probably over £10m per year.

4. Progress since the ‘80s Clapham Inquiry (1988)
'Hidden Limits' introduced (1989)
Southall Inquiry (2000)
T059 Fatigue and shift work among passenger train drivers ( )
ROGs introduced (2006)
ORR Managing Fatigue in Safety Critical Workers (2006)
T699 Fatigue and shift work in freight drivers and track workers ( )
This slide and the next one put RSSB’s research into context of other key events.
Hidden limits (generic, not specific, operationally achievable – 12hrs per shift, 12hrs rest, 72hrs per week) introduced following Clapham.
T059 arose out of 1 of the Southall recommendations requesting that drivers hours of work be reviewed.
Following T059 RSSB drafted GPG which remained in draft, because following consultation, industry requested further research into different populations of workers, namely freight drivers and track workers. The request from industry for more detailed work to look at fatigue in the freight and IMC sectors, together with the Brentingby freight accident led to T699.

5. Progress in recent years
T997 Managing Occupational Road Risk Associated with Road Vehicle Driver Fatigue (2012)
T1082 Developing fitness for duty checks and predicting the risk of experiencing fatigue (being scoped)
T1083 Preparing rail industry guidance on biomathematical models (being scoped)
T1084 Preparing company guidance for fatigue control options for first night shifts (being scoped)
A few years after that the next step was to look at other environments that railway workers undertake safety critical tasks. So there was a study on occupational road risk associated with railway workers driving on the road network.

6. Progress in recent years
T997 Managing Occupational Road Risk Associated with Road Vehicle Driver Fatigue (2012)
T1082 Developing fitness for duty checks and predicting the risk of experiencing fatigue (being scoped)
T1083 Preparing rail industry guidance on biomathematical models (being scoped)
T1084 Preparing company guidance for fatigue control options for first night shifts (being scoped)
I’ll talk about these two projects a little more in a moment, but there are three more pieces of research on fatigue that we are scoping now. These are the bottom three on the slide, in lighter blue. The first one is about fitness for duty decisions, the second on biomathematical models of fatigue which are essentially tools to check base rosters, and the last one is about coping with first night shifts. I will give you more information on these a bit later.

7. T997 Managing Occupational Road Risk Associated with Road Vehicle Driver Fatigue
What was interesting about this project was the recognition that although we are the rail industry, we have a large presence on the road network.

8. T997 Background
1,901 fatalities & 23,122 serious injuries on roads in 2011
Fatigue estimated to be a contributory factor in
up to 20% of all RTCs
25% - 33% of all serious and fatal road traffic
incidents are work- related (DfT). ROSPA put
figure at 40%.
Around 40% of sleep-related accidents involve commercial vehicles.
Business drivers with high work-related mileage have over 50% more injury accidents than non-business drivers
And the road network is a risky place to be. Just to give you a bit of context, the DfT report that there were 1,901 fatalities & 23,122 serious injuries on Britain’s roads in 2011.
We know that fatigue contributes to these incidents and the best estimate that up to 20% of all RTCs and up to one quarter of fatal and serious accidents.
Driving for work also seems to be more risky than driving for other purposes. Depending on what data you look at and how you cut it, 25% - 40% of all serious and fatal UK road traffic incidents involve drivers on the road for work purposes. Looking at commercial vehicles for example, they make up about 2% of the national vehicle fleet and 6% of the distance travelled by all vehicles on UK road, but are involved in 40% of fatigue related crashes.
Official figures vary and also likely to underestimate risk.

9. T997 Scale of the problem in rail
Estimated 73,000+ drivers in the rail industry accumulating a large but unknown mileage
900 RTCs recorded in SMIS ( ) and very few accidents from Network Rail contracts suggests significant under-reporting
RSSB Road Driving Risk Industry survey revealed 500 RTC events, 100 injuries and 5 fatalities in one year. Fatigue seen as the major risk to drivers
So what do we know about the problem in rail?
It is estimated that around 73,000 highly skilled people in the industry who drive for work, whether this is their main work activity or not. We don’t know what their total mileage is.
Workforce road driving safety as an industry risk is not well understood or recognised. Between 2007 and 2012 just over 900 RTCs were recorded in SMIS and the number of RTC SMIS reports from Network Rail contracts indicate very few accidents over past 4 years. Fatigue data is not collected in SMIS so we don’t know the contribution of fatigue to these, but on the whole based on comparisons to other industries actual accidents are likely to be more than 20 times greater than reported.
In Oct 2012 RSSB administered a Road Driving Risk Industry survey which aimed to gain broader understanding of road driving risk across various rail operations and support activities and provided further evidence. 27 companies responded (=36% response rate) and self-reported 500 RTC events, 100 injuries and 5 fatalities were recorded in one year. based on about a third of the industry (both in numbers of organisations and proportion of road fleet). Fatigue was seen as the major risk to drivers.

10. T997 Research deliverables
RED 35 issued on the topic of
‘fatigue at the wheel’.
Guide for Road Vehicle Drivers
and their Managers
Guide for Companies
Summary leaflet for drivers
Awareness-raising poster
So what are the outputs from the RSSB research?
RED 35 was issued on the topic of ‘fatigue at the wheel’. It uses a dramatic reconstruction (based on real events) to focus the minds of people at safety briefings to the issues involved. The DVD includes interviews with the Office of Rail Regulation, RMT safety representative, Human Factors, Director of RSSB National Programmes and DB Schenker who discuss work-related driving, fatigue and what the industry is doing to manage the risks.
Other deliverables from the T997 project include:
Guide for road vehicle drivers and their managers
Guide for companies - Target audience – Heads of Fleet, Safety managers, those responsible for design of work schedules, SMS/FRMS implementation
A summary leaflet for drivers
Awareness-raising poster
All produced following a desk based literature review of the fatigue and road safety literature and research to-date in consultation and with the full support of a cross industry Steering Group – Network Rail, RMT, ORR, Volker Rail, Balfour Beatty, Babcock, Railway Heritage Trust.
These materials are available for you to use.

11. Fitness for duty decisions

12. T1082: Fitness for duty decisions
© RSSB 3 Feb 2015
To comply with their duties under general health and safety legislation and (for staff doing safety critical tasks) the Railway and Other Guided Transport Systems Regulations, rail companies should have processes to ensure that staff are fit for duty before they undertake safety critical work and remain fit throughout their shift.
Mitigating fatigue risk through fitness for duty checks is a genuine challenge. It can be very difficult for a person to predict what their physiological and psychological state will be at the end of their shift. Supervisors making decisions on the fitness of individuals presenting themselves for work are faced with a similar problem. In addition, particularly in environments where there is productivity pressure people may underestimate their risk of becoming tired.
A variety of tools have emerged in recent years, which aim to investigate and track the quantity and quality of sleep that a person receives. These tools could play a role during fitness for duty decisions, by giving employees and managers more objective information to feed into the decision making process. For example:
• There are basic rules of thumb regarding sleep duration and indicators of sleep quality, which in questionnaire form, can help people to think about how well-rested they are.
• There are tools/apps which can take sleep/wake data as inputs to predict likelihood of fatigue (these are different to tools which take roster data to infer likely sleep patterns and predict fatigue on that basis).
• There are ‘wearable’ tools which claim to automatically track when a person is asleep and the quality of sleep they are experiencing.
These are only some examples to highlight the state of knowledge and technology. Nevertheless, they do suggest that scientific and technological developments have the potential to address the difficulties in assessing fatigue risk, at least in part, by providing better quality information to feed into the fitness for duty decision.
The tool is primarily intended to be used by safety critical staff, such as train drivers, guards/conductors, signallers, infrastructure workers, maintenance staff and managers involved in the booking on process. Nevertheless, it is likely to be beneficial to a much wider group, including office workers who have to drive home at the end of the working day.
Aim: To investigate which tool(s) could be used to mitigate fatigue risk by informing fitness for duty decisions, select a promising tool that best meets the requirements and evaluate it.

13. T1082: Approach
We expect that the project will broadly follow this process.
The evaluation should include, for example, an assessment of the validity of the outputs of the tool(s), usability, user attitudes towards using it and any indicators that the tool has an effect on fitness for duty decisions. Therefore, in addition to periodic questionnaires, interviews or similar exercises to gather feedback about the tool itself and its use, some roster and fatigue/sleep data will need to be collected from staff. The data collected will need to be compared against the outputs generated by the tool(s) during fitness for duty decisions.
The majority of the sample should comprise staff who have highly irregular shift patterns, though the sample should not exclude staff such as passenger train drivers, who tend to have more predictable rosters.

14. Biomathematical models

15. T1083: Biomathematical models
© RSSB 3 Feb 2015
Many rail companies use fatigue assessment tools, based on mathematical models, as one part of their assessments of likely staff fatigue. A variety of such tools are available, including the Health and Safety Executive’s Fatigue and Risk Index (FRI) tool. Some of these tools are integrated into rostering software. When you input a roster pattern into these tools, they give you an indication of the fatigue that would likely result from that roster. For example the FRI tells you the percentage of the population that would feel very tired (this is based on a 1 to 7 scale used in fatigue research, which I won’t go into detail about, apart from to say that there is good science behind it).
Aim: To create guidance on tools using biomathematical models of fatigue to meet the information needs of the rail industry in GB.

16. T1083: Approach

17. First night shifts

18. T1084: First night shifts
There is debate within the scientific community regarding whether fatigue increases or decreases throughout consecutive night shifts. This debate and uncertainty is reflected in the differing levels of fatigue risk predicted by tools which use biomathematical models, which was highlighted in the RAIB report in the Shap rollback incident in In this incident a driver on his first night shift fell asleep while driving a train. The investigation found that different tools gave varying predictions of driver fatigue for that shift, based on the roster pattern of the driver involved in the incident.
While the scientific debate continues, it is clear that first night shifts require special consideration, because they require a change in sleeping pattern, and anecdotally we know that first night shifts are hard. In other sectors such as medicine, there is published guidance on preparing for first night shifts, either as a standalone volume or as part of broader fatigue guidance. Although both ORR and RSSB have produced extensive guidance on managing fatigue, there is no rail industry guidance specifically on how staff can prepare for first night shifts and relatively little guidance on company fatigue-related risk control options specifically for first night shifts.
© RSSB 3 Feb 2015
Aim: To produce guidance for the industry on potential measures that individuals and companies could adopt to mitigate the fatigue-related risk during first night shifts.

19. T1084: Approach
A review of scientific literature and guidance available specifically on managing fatigue for night shifts and the first night worked.
Research and guidance from the rail industry and other safety critical industries within and outside of GB.
Consultations with companies or organisations (not limited to the rail industry) that already have guidance on managing fatigue for first nights worked.
Methods of fatigue management for staff, which can be used before or during first night shifts.
Methods that can be used by companies to control risk from staff fatigue during first night shifts.
An evaluation of the proposed measures against available research literature (i.e. does this measure make sense knowing what we do about fatigue risk).

20. Conclusions
The rail industry has come a long way in terms of fatigue risk management
Lot of useful guidance and good practice
Incremental change to increase effectiveness
There is strong industry appetite for more
Exciting opportunities to get involved – we need your help!

21. If you would like to learn more…
(soon to be moved to

22. Thank you for your attention
Dan Basacik
Human Factors Specialist
RSSB