RIW PROGRAM AND ARTC WORKING TOGETHER TO PROTECT WORKERS DURING COVID-19

The Rail Industry Worker (RIW) Program recently partnered with the Australian Rail Track Corporation (ARTC) to further protect workers during the COVID-19 pandemic. The key goal was to trial an alternative process to the physical signing of the Pre-Work Brief, thereby reducing the likelihood of virus transmission between rail workers.

Metro Trains Australia (MTA) was able to use capabilities built into the RIW System to enable ARTC North Coast Protection Officers to record attendance and award competencies electronically using the RIW app. This essentially delivered a contactless process for rail workers who were able to swipe their physical or virtual card via the RIW App.
 
A quick online training session saw Field Supervisors and System Administrators brought up to speed. The successful trial involved:

	45 Protection Officers
	Working across 9 sites
	144 competencies awarded in the first 24 hours

Chris Turner, Senior Safety Advisor ARTC, was very pleased with the outcome of the trial. “The Protection Officers were given Access Controller rights within the RIW system. This was a simple and quick process, enabling 45 ARTC Protection Officers to use their phones to electronically record the attendance of the pre-work brief using the RIW App. Not only does the RIW System capture and record fatigue hours between companies and worksites, it provides a secondary assurance of hours worked to assist with accurate invoicing,” he said.
 
The ARTC acknowledged the support of the Telarah to Acacia Management Team during the trial. For more information about this trial and the capabilities of the RIW System, email us at info@riw.net.au.

CONTINUOUS IMPROVEMENT FOR ASSESSABLE JOB ROLES

As reported in Employer Administrator Update #22, we outlined how some competencies were used across multiple job roles, and how updating the evidence would then cause the job role to require re-assessment, even if the updated evidence didn’t relate to that particular job role. If a competency was updated, any job roles that shared that competency would drop back to “invalid” until re-assessment had been conducted by an Assessor.

To resolve this, MTA have been working on replicating these competencies. This means creating individual competencies for each job role.  This replication of competencies will allow an Employer Administrator to update the evidence requirements associated to the job role, without having any impact on any other assessable job roles.

MTA can advise that phase 1, 2 and 3 of the roll out have now been applied to the RIW System.

So what does this mean for cardholders and administrators?

Administrators will see additional awards of unique competencies on some cardholder profiles. Phase 2 deployment included the award of competencies containing a new, unique competency name and code, which is the competency name plus the job role name combined (refer screenshot below), and phase 3 then made these competencies valid. At this stage there is no impact to cardholders.
 


Phase 4, being deployed in the coming weeks, includes an update to job role definitions and groupings, which includes removing the original competency from the job role definition and replacing it with the unique version of the competency, while maintaining the assessment and job role status.

Please stay tuned for more information on phase 4 and any additional updates.