HS2 Health and safety analysis.

In an attempt to reduce work related injuries the High Speed 2 project undertook an analysis of health and safety data sourced from the Crossrail project, with the assumption that two large rail projects would have similar risk factors.

I led a team of 4 analysts conducting a deep dive into all aspects of safety related incidents over the lifetime of Crossrail. We deliberately adopted a naive stance, rejecting standard assumptions of health and safety until they could be compared against the corpus of data available.

Amongst the findings we discovered:

• No evidence that clocks changing was a significant factor for workplace injury.
• A limited impact of “Toolbox talks” or safety briefings with a detrimental effect at higher frequency (presumed due to complacency)
• No increased injuries during snow days, but an increased injury rate approximately one week after snowy weather. Presumed to be caused by an increase in caution during the snowy weather, since the hazard it presents is evident, but a reduced level of caution once that risk and resultant risk controls are removed.