Fatigue management – a matter of life or death?

Fatigue management regulations are implemented in the rail construction industry to ensure not only that workers are treated fairly, but also that they are sufficiently rested to carry out what can often be dangerous jobs which require full focus and attention. Any impairment to their work can result in expensive mistakes, injury and, in the most extreme circumstances, death.

Having components of any given job improperly carried out can be an administrative headache that sets work back days, weeks or even months, and can potentially have severe knock-on safety consequences. The chance of human error leading to this is heightened when workers are fatigued, so deploying a tired workforce makes little sense.

DEFINING FATIGUE AND ITS CONSEQUENCES

The Health & Safety Executive describes the consequences of fatigue as follows:

Fatigue results in slower reactions, reduced ability to process information, memory lapses, absent-mindedness, decreased awareness, lack of attention, underestimation of risk, reduced coordination etc. Fatigue can lead to errors and accidents, ill-health and injury, and reduced productivity. It is often a root cause of major accidents e.g. Herald of Free Enterprise, Chernobyl, Texas City, Clapham Junction, Challenger and Exxon Valdez.

The implications of fatigue can be vast and, like any other hazard in the workplace, fatigue needs to be properly managed.

This is something that was brought home to the rail construction industry earlier this year when Renown Consultants Limited was fined £450,000 by the Office of Rail and Road, with £300,000 in costs as well, for failures in managing its fatigue protocols which resulted in the tragic deaths of two of its workers when they crashed their van on the way home from a job.

For safety critical work, there is a requirement that there must be a minimum of 12-hours rest between booking off a turn of duty before booking onto the next. Having this requirement is one thing, actively implementing it is another.

IMPLEMENTING, ASSESSING AND MANAGING FATIGUE PROCEDURES

Many companies do not have adequate systems in place for monitoring and implementing fatigue management procedures. In the case of Renown it was noted that, “Operations and managers knew what they were supposed to do in relation to fatigue but lip service was paid to these systems. Senior operations cut corners.”

This is where technology can help firms, with procedures modelled into business systems that can plan, guide and monitor staff, ensuring fatigue is always being considered. Rosters and shifts can be planned in advance based on the work to be carried out. The systems can include rules to consider factors related to both the time of the day that the shift is occurring and the travel time involved for the staff to potentially be deployed. This helps prevent allocation of resources to jobs that contravene the 12-hour rest period because of the travel time to get to or from the job.

There also needs to be improved recording of shifts, overtime and any shift swaps that have occurred. A management system can help by allowing staff to confirm or clock actual time spent, which again may trigger a knock-on warning for future planned work from rules configured to consider fatigue. The Office of Road and Rail (ORR) have also said that companies should be far more proactive in talking to staff and finding out their own concerns on fatigue and how it is affecting them. This could be done by capturing information directly onto questionnaires within a system. When completed these can automatically be flagged for management review and any remedial action required can be instigated, with all information stored against the staff record.

Capturing all this information into a single system allows risks to be automatically flagged to planners. They will then be able to amend and adapt the rosters based on the information presented to them. Having this data to hand ensures companies can comply with their risk assessment guidelines and not plan jobs when they do not have resources to safely do so.

SAFETY FIRST

The ORR was also critical of companies accepting jobs without carrying out proper risk assessments as to whether they have the staff to carry out a job safely. Having systems that can model ‘what if’ planning scenarios to indicate whether it is safe to accept work based on all elements of a risk assessment helps this decision making.

Furthermore, if accidents do occur, having auditable systems in place demonstrates that correct risk assessments were undertaken, helping pinpoint causes quicker and helping co-operation with any third-party investigations.

The RSSB has highlighted that fatigue is a factor in some 20% of high risk accidents in the rail industry. This high percentage suggests that many firms are underestimating the seemingly intangible impact of it. Implementing robust management procedures around this will help firms to see the full scope of the problem and align their workforces correctly to mitigate it.

It makes no sense from a financial, personal or moral standpoint to facilitate fatigued workers carrying out intensive, dangerous and important work. Deploying the correct technology is a major step in the right direction.

For more information on CACI’s Cygnum software, which helps organisations to gain a holistic view of their workforce and processes, please visit: caci.co.uk/cygnum.