Railway suicide in Australia: An overview of incidents using data from a nationally representative coronial database

TrackSAFE commissioned The University of Melbourne to conduct an in-depth review of Australian railway suicide coronial data to develop the evidence base for prevention interventions. We extracted data about railway  suicides that occurred over the period 2015-2019 from the National Coronial Information System (NCIS) and systematically coded the detailed circumstances of incidents, focusing particularly on the events of the period  proximal to the suicide. While the NCIS contains coded and non-coded data, we mainly used the NCIS non-coded data for this project – that is the information contained in the police summaries and coroners’ findings. For each  case, we read any available finding, police summary, toxicology and autopsy form and coded all information into our bespoke data collection form. The numbers presented throughout this report are likely to be underestimates as  we cannot assume  that specific information we were interested in would necessarily be reported in the coronial documents. It is therefore important to remember that these findings should be interpreted with caution because of the high number of individuals for whom we did not have information.