Hannah Crowley

Said the following about Scott Maddison:

“Linbrooke Services are renowned for an impeccable safety record (100% serious injury free in 2013 and 2014), a dedicated HSEQ team and thorough safety training schemes. This is largely due to the dedication, passion and dogged determination of Scott Maddison - Linbrooke’s Head of HSEQ.

With an impressive decade spent in the Royal Navy as a Sonar Engineer, Maddison has spent the last 5 and a half years building our health and safety department on a strong and resilient foundation. Incorporating the service based values of courage, loyalty, integrity and discipline into all he does, his department runs a variety of internal and external training programmes designed to improve all safety prevention measures and prepare employees for how to act in emergency situations.

Transferring further skills and ideas from the military, Scott collaborated with ex-combat medic and chief medical instructor, John Byrne in order to create a course named ‘Actions On’. While Linbrooke have an adequate amount of trained first aiders, Scott identified that this training alone may not address the “real life” events that operatives may come across in life threatening, pressure fuelled situations. Exploiting his own knowledge along with Byrne’s experience - gained while working as a staff sergeant within the Army Medical Core, the French Foreign Legion and The UK Parachute Regiment – Scott designed Actions On to be a scenario based training. Taking place on Network Rail Infrastructure, the scheme provides the effect of live working in an authentic environment with the appropriate equipment. The course also utilises props such as “liquid latex” “laceration blood pumps” and “resuscitation Annie”. This is due to the fact that visual, proactive erudition is frequently more effective for site-based staff than theoretical classroom based learning.

Effectively this has helped over 90% of our site based operatives to date by supplying them with the tools and the confidence to deal with similar, ‘real’ situations that could potentially occur. Future courses will incorporate candidates from all across the commerce in holding with Scott’s ambition to improve safety industry wide.

“I would just like to say how good the Actions On course was for myself – and for all other participants. I personally learned and gained more from the course than all the other first aid courses combined. It was better than the First aid courses I had in the Army as well - and I now feel more confident going out on track with the knowledge that if the worst was to happen I could deal with it and overcome the situation in hand. I feel strongly that everyone in the Linbrooke family – and the industry as a whole - would benefit from having this for both work life and home life as well.”

– Dave Patterson, Linbrooke Delivery Engineer

Joining us after 5 years at Balfour Beatty’s, Scott had already demonstrated his dedication to the health and safety of our industry. He was quietly instrumental in improving safety when working at height whilst on a vehicle as well as designing the modification of trailers to enable a safer loading of mini excavators – both actions which got Balfour’s noticed and subsequently shortlisted for Institute for Occupational Safety and Health awards. Within an industry that is dangerous by nature, perfection can never truly be attained, yet Scott reaches for it, regardless. He explained his commitment to the cause by earnestly saying “I have a passion for people and a great respect for the safety of each and every person. Having already served my country in the forces, I can see no greater calling than continuing to protect life on a different level.”

In line with our steady growth over the last few years, Scott brought a mission statement to Linbrooke that declares HSEQ’s desire to “collaborate with clients and colleagues alike in order to provide measurably safer environments through the training, research, assessments and application of expert leadership, and to sustain innovative and proactive safety management while maintaining a continual drive for excellence.”

Despite Scott’s continually positive safety statistics, he refuses to allow himself or his workforce the ‘luxury’ of growing complacent. Creating the strapline “measurably safer with every shift”, he truly strives to achieve this on a daily basis. As the sergeant of our workforce, he actively encourages close call reporting and provides staff with the confidence to manage up and speak out honestly when they believe something is wrong. This is assisted by the delivery of conferences, training schemes and presentations such as the ‘Rail Safety Stand Down’ which introduced the integration of the ‘debriefing app’. This allows individuals to capture and share lessons learnt, best practice and what needs to change to ensure a measurably safer shift as well as promoting appropriate reviewing, debriefing and honest self-reporting of each team’s mistakes.

Although Scott has a direct and assured effect on the well-being of Linbrooke, his passion and vision sees that he goes above and beyond simply improving health and safety within his own parameters. With a desire to revolutionise and safeguard the industry in its entirety, Scott provides training across the commerce. He also teamed up with Network Rail to organise a routine Safety Action Group (SAG) which was initially hosted in Glasgow. This non-commercial, open book forum invites all principle contractors for Network Rail to share Health and Safety findings, working practices and incidents - both innovative and negative – in order to better improve secure practice across the industry board. Multiple organisations were invited to participate, and our attendees to date have been Telent, Babcock, AMCO, Spencers, Atkins, Network Rail and QTS. This forum requires absolute honesty and trust throughout to ensure that the innovative experiences can serve as positive examples and the negative can be more easily/appropriately counteracted in future. A reduction from 2 to 0 in the RIDDOR rate and an increase in reported ‘close calls’ is significant enough assurance that this forum is a worthwhile pursuit and that Scott Maddison is RailStaff worthy!“