REGISTER

Phillip Barker, MIRO, Dip TSI.

Senior Transport Safety Investigator Australian Transport Safety Bureau

A greater understanding of safety related occurrences can assist railway operators and railway managers to prioritise resources to manage risk. Before you can manage a hazard it helps to understand how accidents and incidents are occurring. Implementation of corrective action, policy development and planning comes from a process of risk assessment. Given that occurrences pose a safety and financial risk to railway operators and managers, a program of analysis to look at the range of contributing factors, should form part of any safety management system. This should lead to greater safety and potential gains in efficiency. This paper will briefly outline the general process adopted by the ATSB to analyse occurrences. The status of the National Rail Occurrence Database will also be outlined.