The Point to Point Transport Commission conducts regular safety audits to ensure a service provider’s Safety Management System (SMS) meets the safety standards in the Regulation and identifies and records:
- reasonably foreseeable risks to the health and safety of drivers, passengers and others
- the control measures taken to eliminate or minimise the risks, and
- what is done to maintain the control measures
Bankstown Canterbury Community Transport recently achieved outstanding results in their safety audit by clearly demonstrating how it identifies, manages and minimises its safety risks. We spoke with Rachel Thompson, Manager at Bankstown Canterbury Community Transport, to find out how they developed their SMS and what the audit experience was like.
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Q: Can you tell me about your organisation?
A: Bankstown Canterbury Community Transport is a not-for-profit organisation providing transport with care to seniors and people living with disability. Our organisation has been around for more than 30 years, provides about 65,000 trips per year with around 1,500 active clients.
We have 35 paid employees and a team of volunteers, students and work placements.
While the majority of the transport we provide is exempt from the Point to Point Transport (P2P) regulations, the number of P2P eligible trips is increasing, especially as more clients transition across to the National Disability Insurance Scheme and Home Care Packages.
Q. How did you develop your SMS? Were there any specific challenges you came across?
A: We had a number of challenges in developing our SMS as our organisation was previously exempt from a number of regulations. To assist us we organised a visit earlier in the year from the P2P Commission Advisory Team.
As we developed our SMS we compared requirements under the Bus Operators Accreditation Scheme (BOAS) and the P2P regulations. Some of our vehicles (those with more than 12 seats) will be captured by the Passenger Transport Regulations by the end of 2018 and we wanted to develop a system that met both sets of regulations.
We found the templates in the BOAS Handbook helpful and adapted them to meet the P2P SMS requirements. The P2P regulations were also useful in developing our SMS.
Q. What was the audit experience like?
A: We had not been involved in this kind of audit before and were initially daunted by the prospect. In preparation for the audit we did a gap analysis and developed policies and procedures that weren’t already in place.
We also designed some additional, simple tracking systems to ensure we were meeting our safety requirements, such as excel spreadsheets with conditional formatting to track when action items are due.
Q. Did you have an advisory visit before the audit? Was it useful?
A: The advisory visit earlier in the year was really helpful. The Advisory Team allayed some of the concerns we had about the audit and gave us confidence that we were on the right track with the changes we were implementing.
For further information see the Safety Audit factsheet and the Safety Audit Tool.