Abstract

A railway employee encounters an average of four deaths throughout his or her career, plus an unknown number of less serious accidents. These employees are at risk of developing major post-traumatic stress disorders or experiencing low-intensity adverse effects that nonetheless have a significant impact on them.
Traumatic event management plays an important role upstream of psychotherapeutic treatment in order to reduce the negative impact and facilitate recovery and return to work.

This project will assess incident-management and support practices used by railway companies in Québec. These practices will be compared and the researchers will attempt to identify facilitating factors and environmental and organizational obstacles to their implementation.

In addition, the project will lead to a better understanding of the development of traumatic reactions to serious railway incidents, and identify the links between incident management, support and the effects of incidents. The utility of specific components of intervention protocols will be validated and recommendations will be made with a view to reducing the negative impact of such incidents on employees.