Health assessments for RSWs
Determining the impact
Background
A key role of ATHRA is to monitor for proposed changes and initiatives by regulatory authorities, and to pass these on to ATHRA members. This is to enable you, as an ATHRA member to make informed decisions about the potential impacts of those initiatives and advise the decision maker of your concerns.
To assist ATHRA members, information including matters of importance and changes of significance are regularly provided through webinars, factsheets and monthly news bulletins that are emailed to all member email addresses registered with the ATHRA Secretary.
Members are reminded, ATHRA does not set standards, and is not a regulatory authority for the T&H sector. It can and does represent the views of the T&H sector to those regulatory authorities however those authorities are not obliged to act upon or accept those views put to them by ATHRA and others.
Health Assessments
Following consultation with ATHRA members at our May 2024 webinar, National Transport Commission (NTC) released the National Standard for Health Assessment in November 2024.
ATHRA organised another webinar in March 2025 to brief members of the requirements of the standard. NTC had copies of questions from ATHRA members at the webinar, and has now also provided the following additional written information:
- NTC guidance document Risk Categorisation and Health Assessment Requirements
- NTC responses to ATHRA member questions
We encourage you to read these documents, if you haven’t already.
ATHRA has written to the NTC seeking to understand:
- what information was provided by the NTC to the Office of Impact Assessment (OIA) with respect to the T&H sector that informed the OIA’s assessment;
- what opportunity there is now to undertake a detailed Regulatory Impact Assessment of the introduction of the new Health Standard on the T&H sector, and
- if it is possible to temporarily pause the application of the new standard for the T&H sector.
Survey on impact of new health assessments
Members are reporting differing experiences and concerns relating to the implementation of the new health assessments including:
- We are just getting on with it and it’s not causing us too many concerns;
- We are having problems accessing an Authorised Health Professional (AHP) to conduct the assessment;
- We are concerned about the costs and losing active volunteers from our workforce as a result of the new standard.
ATHRA is keen to collect objective data about the impact of the new arrangements to present to the relevant authorities.
ATHRA invites its members to complete the survey by Friday 30 May 2025. Subject to the number of responses received this will provide a comprehensive picture of how the standard is impacting Tourist and Heritage railways around the country. We encourage all members to respond.