Towards a positive railway safety culture

In 2012, the UIC Safety Platform held three one-day conferences on the theme of safety culture. These conferences brought together railway operators and representatives of other industries (energy, healthcare, chemicals, aviation) and gave rise to two major questions:

• What are the links and interactions between safety management and safety culture?

• How can we measure safety culture?

These two questions were explored at greater length by the UIC Human Factors Working Group and a dedicated “Safety Culture” task force.

This report presents the conclusions of their work.

Whereas the concept of safety management is nowadays fairly well defined in a number of legal texts, the same cannot be said of the concept of safety culture.

However, if a company wishes to improve and measure its safety culture, it needs to define its goals and have at its disposal a set of relevant metrics against which to measure its performance.