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New Metra Suicide Prevention Staff Training 'Successful'

Flickr user Luke Jones / "Railroad Tracks" (CC V 2.0) http://bit.ly/2FudahT

Metra’s suicide prevention staff training initiative already has been proven successful, according to its chief safety and information officer.

More than one-thousand Metra employees within the last year have taken a four-hour training course to help identify emotional distress and suicidal tendencies in passengers and co-workers.

“If you have somebody hanging around a platform, multiple trains go by, and nobody gets on, you know, the station agent may recognize that and go out there and ask the individual – you know, just engage them in conversation, say, ‘Hi, how are you today? What’s going on?’” Metra chief safety and information officer Hilary Konczal said.

Metra officials say suicide rates being at a national high was the main catalyst for the program’s creation, and the program already resulted in railroad staff preventing attempted suicides.

Metra conductor Gordon Bowe went through the training. He says incidents involving someone trying to kill themselves can take a psychological toll for train staff that can’t stop the train, since conductors are the ones that have to evaluate the scene and call first responders.

“So a lot of that could be devastating to the employee itself, in regards to the accident and trying to cope with it and deal with it, and trying to understand what pushes peoples’ buttons to want to […] take their life,” Bowe said.

But Bowe says he thinks the new training can help prevent that. Metra officials say the commuter line is the only one in the country that has a staff training program like this.

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