Baines Simmons Consulting Fatigue Risk Management Diagnostic

Fatigue Risk Management Diagnostic

Our Fatigue Risk Management Diagnostic (FRMD) assesses the extent to which your organisation is exposed to fatigue risk and the maturity and effectiveness of the FRM processes that are already in place. This enables organisations to be better placed to make informed decisions on where to prioritise focus and how operational demands can be met alongside ensuring fatigue is appropriately managed.

Fatigue can compromise safety and operational effectiveness. It increases the likelihood of accidents and absenteeism, and diminishes employee health and productivity. An organisation’s Fatigue Risk Management (FRM) processes should ensure that employees are sufficiently well-rested to enable them to be alert enough to perform their role safely.

Fatigue Risk Management Diagnostic

Through the FRMD, you will gain the confidence to answer the following questions:

Are our FRM processes as effective as we want and need them to be?
What are our key organisational fatigue risks, and are we managing them appropriately?
Where do we need to adjust or add FRM processes, and how do we go about this?

What does an FRMD involve?

The FRMD identifies any FRM processes that are missing or not working as intended, as well as an organisation-wide assessment of fatigue levels, including the causes and contributors to that fatigue. To provide this, we undertake:

Evaluation of your documentation for compliance with the relevant regulatory requirements and industry best practice
Interviews with key stakeholders and focus groups and / or a survey with employees to understand people’s experiences of fatigue, fatigue management, context, and organisational culture
Quantifying the level of fatigue associated with work schedules using a bio-mathematical fatigue model
Where relevant, an environmental assessment of sleep and work facilities

The data collection for the FRMD is designed to capture the multi-factorial contributors to fatigue, including factors specific to the workplace and working pattern, as well as non-work related contributors to fatigue. Following the FRMD, we will work with you to create an FRM Implementation or Improvement Plan, which will include specific actions that you can take to implement or improve FRM in your organisation. These actions will be prioritised in terms of ease of implementation, and impact on FRM.

Why Choose Our FRMD?

Developed and delivered by our Fatigue Risk Management experts, our FRMD offers:

Assessment against appropriately regulatory standards and global best practice
A maturity assessment of how well fatigue risk is being managed against key performance indicators
Roster analysis that provides the organisation with a system-wide view of how effectively FRM is controlling fatigue associated with working patterns
Fatigue surveys and/or focus groups to understand the causes of fatigue in your workforce, its consequences and how well the current fatigue controls are working
An implementation or improvement plan enabling prioritisation of your next steps in FRM

Our Experience

Baines Simmons’ FRM experts have over 15 years of experience of working with operators to assist them to manage fatigue risk. This includes implementing all areas of an FRMS as well as supporting operators who are managing fatigue within their management system. The team also support aviation regulators in assessing FRMS manuals and safety cases that have been submitted by operators who are seeking to work outside the published flight and duty time regulations.

We have undertaken FRMDs for organisations in different safety-critical industries, including:

Airlines
Non-commercial aviation operators
Air Ambulance and Search and Rescue helicopter providers
Airline maintenance organisations
The energy sector, including in on-shore and off-shore environments
Maritime operators
Heavy and light rail operators

Part of Our FRM Pathway

FRMDs can support you no matter your experience with FRM. For those just beginning their implementation of FRM, the FRMD can identify ‘fatigue hotspots’, allowing prioritisation of effort and attention, as well as identifying the elements of FRM that are already present in your wider management system, to avoid ‘re-inventing the wheel’. An FRMD can also be used for more mature organisations, to demonstrate your ongoing improvement, check progress, or prepare for an external audit. For those aviation operators who are looking to move from managing fatigue within the management system to an ‘approved FRMS’ that supports a safety case, the FRMD shows those elements that require the most work, and can help you to prepare for the assessment your regulator will undertake following your application.