Australia National Standard for Health Assessment of Rail Safety Workers 2024 2.1: Establish a health risk management system: set the level and frequency of health assessment for each rail safety worker according to the risk of the tasks they perform, in the context of the operator's own operating and engineering environment and existing controls, identifying what could go wrong through ill-health, the consequences, and the controls needed

What does 2.1 require?

A rail transport operator must establish systems and procedures that give every rail safety worker the level and frequency of health assessment that matches the risks of their tasks. The approach rests on risk categorisation: it is not practical to individualise assessment for every worker, so tasks are categorised, assessments and fitness criteria are matched to the categories, timing and frequency are defined, and a standard reporting framework is applied. Health assessments are only one treatment of the risk of a serious incident, so they sit beside engineering and administrative controls, and the existence or absence of such controls determines the human attributes a task requires. Standards cannot be set at the highest level for safety's sake; they must match the risk so that anti-discrimination and privacy law are respected. Because the work environment determines the attributes and risk, each operator determines its own health assessment requirements.