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66 Improving Safety-Related Rules Compliance in the Public Transportation Industry
Review Process
After submittal, the report will go through a multistep process before it reaches the attention
of the report review team (Figure 14). The safety reporting program liaison or an appointed
report analyst managed by the liaison must perform several intermediary steps. These include
coding the report with respect to the event and report taxonomies, clarifying any vagaries during
a callback with the reporter and de-identification. The analyst needs to be a subject-matter expert
familiar with the transit operations he or she will be reviewing. The taxonomy presented in
Chapter 3 can be used as an initial prototype classification system for a pilot safety reporting
system. The taxonomy may be modified based on the types of reports and comments received
from the results of a pilot safety reporting system.
Just as the reporting process needs to occur in a timely manner, the review process needs to
be expedited to ensure that the review team's corrective actions and recommendations are relevant.
Timely feedback will be a testament to the system's effectiveness and therefore promote system
trust among public transit agency employees. Therefore, team meetings should be scheduled as
often as possible. Report review teams should meet either weekly or monthly depending on the
number of reports they must review.
Some recommendations for the review process include the following:
· Reports should only be reviewed when sufficient/required information is available for the
review team to deliberate on.
· Review old reports first to close them out then review the newer ones. Prioritize the new
reports by risk level, if possible.
· Corrective actions and recommendations should be the end-product of risk assessment and
root cause analysis.
· Maintain complete records of the report review process.
· Follow up with appropriate persons to make sure recommendations have been implemented and
are successful; examine trends from reports before and after implementation to judge success.
Disseminating Safety Reporting System Information
To fully realize the benefits of a safety reporting system, there must be a process for the data
to be disseminated to the reporting employees, the workforce in general, and transit management.
To accomplish this, the data management system must have a user-friendly way to provide mean-
ingful analyses. There are two levels of analyses: (1) the report level containing the narrative, which
informs corrective actions for individuals and (2) the event level, which informs organizational
improvement.
It is important to summarize the data to identify trends. Important ways to summarize the
data include the following:
· Event characteristics
· Causal and contributing factors
· Risk assessment
· Corrective actions and recommendations
The following are common ways data are disseminated from safety reporting systems:
· Newsletters
· Report of the month
· Reports to enhance training and safety drills
· Periodic reports of data trends
· Periodic reports to management by the review team
