Reduce Incidents and save time by being proactive about Fatigue and Fitness management.
Fatigue Management and Fitness for Duty are clearly important issues for the railway industry – but how do we know how big the issues are?
Fatigue and fitness are cited as factors in the majority of incidents.  Better fatigue and fitness management will likely result in fewer incidents – this is self-evident. However, managing the issue after the effect is not good enough. In order to improve the situation, the railway must be proactive and capture data from day-to-day operations, not wait for an incident to happen and then react.
As a result of collaboration between Great Western Railway (GWR) and AssessTech, the AssessTech Competence Management System (ACMS) has been extended to offer a new Check Module, which includes the aCheck App. This is all about enabling railway companies to gather and disseminate information rapidly and efficiently, and then using the data to improve processes, which in turn will reduce incidents and improve performance.
The aCheck app is designed to allow busy managers to sign off, simply and efficiently, on safety-critical checks for fitness for duty, fatigue, safety briefs and anything else the company feels is important. These checks can be done on the go, in the field, using an offline mode and synchronised to the ACMS server when a network connection is available.
The data can then be analysed and used to monitor a range of parameters:
  • Fitness checks can be monitored periodically – coverage of all people is assured by prompting managers to check the people they have seen least recently
  • Fatigue checks can be requested manually or scheduled based on rules associated with a Fatigue Index threshold
  • Alerts can be sent that target specific managers and members of staff with fatigue-related messages, for example, explaining new measures that have been put in place
  • Attendance of safety briefs can be registered, ensuring everyone is up to date with the latest information

Crucially, the closed-loop nature of capturing the information, commissioning the checks and then verifying that the checks are complete promotes increased oversight and analysis by the Operations Team and removes the inherent failures that are often introduced in human correspondence, especially relying on emails. Custom reports, tailored for different business functions, can be made available on all data that has been gathered by the aCheck app. So this can be used, for example, to support Key Performance Indicators for the business or monitor a programme of ongoing fatigue and fitness improvement.