Preventing railway suicide: An open-systems perspective and application

Suicide prevention is a major concern for railway operators internationally. 150-200 people die each year by intentional self-harm in and around train stations in Australia. In the Sydney metropolitan area, this equates to more than a death a week on the Sydney Trains network. These are only suicide deaths. There are additional flow-on effects, such as vicarious trauma to railway operators and other staff and the general public. Prevention of railway suicides is thus an important aspect of railway operation. This paper describes the development, currently in progress, of the world’s first automated risk detection system. Using open-systems theory to embed this system within a complex, real-world operating environment this project, undertaken for Sydney Rail in Australia, a team based out of the Australian National University (ANU) is currently developing two complementary information systems for: the detection and reporting of suicide risk; using these information systems to investigate how different situational factors; and determining how different service interventions interact to influence suicide risk. While the focus of this research is on addressing suicide, the information systems developed, and the open-systems approach used, could lend themselves to a wide range of applications including other railway security issues such as crime, terrorism, or even to reduce unintended accidents.