Article: Wheelchair User Difficulty at Milton Keynes

BJames · 19 Jun 2022

I've just come across this in The Guardian:

A wheelchair user was forced to drag himself up stairs at a railway station platform, saying staff refused to help him owing to health and safety policy.

Chris Nicholson, an athlete and spokesperson for the Myprotein sports brand, was travelling to address an event in London on Friday when the incident took place at Milton Keynes station.

The former rugby player needed to cross to the other side of the station for a connecting train but the lift was broken, forcing him to pull himself up the stairs in 31C (88F) heat.

Nicholson said staff refused to help him use the stairs, saying they told him they couldn’t assist him because of “health and safety policies and they would be at risk if they helped me”.

“I decided to get up the stairs, how? By dragging my chair with one arm, pushing off one arm and collecting my legs each step of the way!” he wrote in a post on Instagram. He described being “in agony and tears halfway up”.

Nicholson said that another man had seen him struggling and helped him carry his wheelchair, before an assistant manager stepped in to carry his bags.

“We are in 2022, access should be a given not a privilege,” Nicholson said. He called for policies to change “to support everyone collectively”, adding: “Things like this happen daily to people with different types of disabilities.”

In a video, also posted on Instagram, Nicholson spoke in detail about why he shared his experience on social media. “People like myself who have different varying abilities to an able-bodied person should have the rights to access all amenities, like anyone else. Doesn’t matter if you are in a wheelchair, if you are on crutches – you should be able to access it,” he said.

“The fact that people aren’t making things readily available to those who are from different backgrounds, different abilities is wrong. The fact that things aren’t in place to cater for those is wrong, and the fact that people are getting treated differently is also wrong.”

Nicholson, who has more than 28,000 followers on Instagram, said that almost 3,000 people had messaged him saying that they had had similar experiences. “It’s absolutely shocking,” he said.

An Avanti West Coast spokesperson said: “We have been made aware of this incident and are sorry to hear about the customer’s experience.

“We have since been in contact with the customer – who has arrived at their destination safely on Friday night.

“We are also liaising with London Northwestern Railway – the train operating company responsible for managing Milton Keynes station – as they investigate the circumstances of what happened.”

London Northwestern Railway declined to comment.

I am interested as to comments on this - staff claim that they should not have helped because of policy. Is this policy correct? And if so, were they right to protect themselves? I must admit, I would very likely opt to help the gentleman but I have had a situation before where 999 have instructed me not to lift my elderly neighbour up when she has been in a relatively safe, albeit uncomfortable, position after falling, because of the likelihood of doing more harm than good. What should have happened in the above situation? I'm inclined to say that a starting point for this is that staff should have been made aware, and in turn made the passenger aware, that this lift was not working before he had alighted, and given an alternative option to complete his journey.

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zwk500 · 19 Jun 2022

BJames said:
I am interested as to comments on this - staff claim that they should not have helped because of policy. Is this policy correct? And if so, were they right to protect themselves?

The staff may well have been briefed not to offer physical assistance if they haven't been trained in manual handling. If you get it wrong, you can cause serious pain and damage to yourself, the person you're carrying or anybody in the vicinity. Dropping somebody down the stairs is very last on the list of things anybody wants to do.

BJames said:
What should have happened in the above situation?

The station should have had a better plan in place than to tell somebody to sort themselves out.

BJames said:
I'm inclined to say that a starting point for this is that staff should have been made aware, and in turn made the passenger aware, that this lift was not working before he had alighted, and given an alternative option to complete his journey.

The warning about the lift is present on journey planners, but telling somebody as they disembark is not particularly helpful. If a new plan can't be thought of in 20 seconds the train will be delayed, and trying to sort things out on the cuff is always liable to going wrong. Disembarking them, agreeing a new plan, making sure everybody who needs to know is aware, then sending them on their way on a later train is better but still leaves the passenger delayed when they shouldn't have been.

danielcanning · 19 Jun 2022

BJames said:
I've just come across this in The Guardian:

I am interested as to comments on this - staff claim that they should not have helped because of policy. Is this policy correct? And if so, were they right to protect themselves? I must admit, I would very likely opt to help the gentleman but I have had a situation before where 999 have instructed me not to lift my elderly neighbour up when she has been in a relatively safe, albeit uncomfortable, position after falling, because of the likelihood of doing more harm than good. What should have happened in the above situation? I'm inclined to say that a starting point for this is that staff should have been made aware, and in turn made the passenger aware, that this lift was not working before he had alighted, and given an alternative option to complete his journey.

This sounds absolutely disgraceful leaving a severely disabled man to drag himself up a flight of stairs.

zwk500 · 19 Jun 2022

danielcanning said:
This sounds absolutely disgraceful leaving a severely disabled man to drag himself up a flight of stairs.

The focus on the staff is wrong here - if you've never been shown proper manual handling technique, aren't strong enough to appropriately handle the individual and don't know their disability, you should be extremely cautious about proceeding to try and lever them up a flight of stairs. Somebody in a wheelchair (especially an ex-rugby player) may have very sensitive positioning requirements for their back and neck. If you handled them wrong, lost your grip (because you were sweating on a hot day, for example) or lost your footing you could cause further injuries or worse.

The failure is with the railway companies for not having a proper plan in place to respond to the broken lifts. They've been out of service for ages, and changing platforms at MKC is necessary for the majority of interchanges you'd be making there. There's options including intercepting journeys at Euston (at the cost of a longer journey time), replatforming connecting trains (at the cost of some delays), or even crossing the line at the end of the platform (at the cost of a fair amount of delay while the lines are blocked).

philthetube · 19 Jun 2022

The situation should not arise, having said that unless I knew that my employer had insurance which would cover me in case of accident I would not consider assisting. I suspect that the only way to safely assist in this situation would be to have a chair suitable for carrying a person upstairs. Thinking one of those with three wheels on the real "legs" which can be rolled upstairs.

yorkie · 19 Jun 2022

danielcanning said:
This sounds absolutely disgraceful leaving a severely disabled man to drag himself up a flight of stairs.

Hang on! What journey were they making?

I doubt the staff simply left the person stranded; it's implied that they did, but do we know that for definite?

The journalists who write these stories tend to want them to sound as sensational as possible.

I suspect what is perhaps more likely is the customer could have been advised regarding alternative services to catch to get them to where they needed to be via a working lift. This could take a long time depending on the availability of services from the relevant platforms. The customer perhaps didn't want to wait and took matters into their own hands.

Of course the customer should have been advised of the lift being out of order (assuming they had assistance booked) unless it had literally suddenly just gone out of service, this would have allowed for alternative provision to be provided.

Are you and/or the journalist who wrote the article saying staff should have carried the person up the stairs?

ScotRail158725 · 19 Jun 2022

danielcanning said:
This sounds absolutely disgraceful leaving a severely disabled man to drag himself up a flight of stairs.

The staff can’t be blamed fully if much at all here to be honest. A number of factors here could have caused the staff to not be able to help, as stated the H&S policy stated in the article. Also the passenger is a former rugby player, who are of large builds, and its bot necessarily going to be easy to carry someone like that up stairs especially when they aren’t mobile

Busaholic · 19 Jun 2022

zwk500 said:
The focus on the staff is wrong here - if you've never been shown proper manual handling technique, aren't strong enough to appropriately handle the individual and don't know their disability, you should be extremely cautious about proceeding to try and lever them up a flight of stairs. Somebody in a wheelchair (especially an ex-rugby player) may have very sensitive positioning requirements for their back and neck. If you handled them wrong, lost your grip (because you were sweating on a hot day, for example) or lost your footing you could cause further injuries or worse.

The failure is with the railway companies for not having a proper plan in place to respond to the broken lifts. They've been out of service for ages, and changing platforms at MKC is necessary for the majority of interchanges you'd be making there. There's options including intercepting journeys at Euston (at the cost of a longer journey time), replatforming connecting trains (at the cost of some delays), or even crossing the line at the end of the platform (at the cost of a fair amount of delay while the lines are blocked).

At the very least staff could and should have taken the wheelchair up and down the stairs: an accident or significant injury could have occurred while they presumably were viewing what was occurring, or had they absolved themselves of that responsibility as well?

philthetube · 19 Jun 2022

Nobody, staff customers or whatever would watch a disabled man drag himself and a chair upstairs, I find it impossible to believe that assistance was not provided for the chair.

danielcanning · 19 Jun 2022

philthetube said:
Nobody, staff customers or whatever would watch a disabled man drag himself and a chair upstairs, I find it impossible to believe that assistance was not provided for the chair.

As someone who is disabled myself, I can well believe that people would just stand and watch a wheelchair user drag themselves up stairs. Some days I have to literally beg for a seat on the tube even though I need a crutch to walk.

zwk500 · 19 Jun 2022

Busaholic said:
At the very least staff could and should have taken the wheelchair up and down the stairs: an accident or significant injury could have occurred while they presumably were viewing what was occurring, or had they absolved themselves of that responsibility as well?

I wasn't there, and don't know the details of exactly what happened when. The article does say an assistant manager stepped in eventually.

My point was that the situation should never have been allowed to develop to the point where the disabled person felt they had no option but to drag themselves up the stairs. The two train companies (and Network Rail) should have had a clear plan to manage the entirely foreseeable situation much better.

philthetube · 19 Jun 2022

danielcanning said:
As someone who is disabled myself, I can well believe that people would just stand and watch a wheelchair user drag themselves up stairs. Some days I have to literally beg for a seat on the tube even though I need a crutch to walk.

Promis I was not on that train, When I was on crutches a while ago I had the opposite problem, I did not want to sit as I found standing up again difficult and painful, it was difficult to persuade people that I did not want a seat.

BJames · 19 Jun 2022

zwk500 said:
The staff may well have been briefed not to offer physical assistance if they haven't been trained in manual handling. If you get it wrong, you can cause serious pain and damage to yourself, the person you're carrying or anybody in the vicinity. Dropping somebody down the stairs is very last on the list of things anybody wants to do.

philthetube said:
The situation should not arise, having said that unless I knew that my employer had insurance which would cover me in case of accident I would not consider assisting. I suspect that the only way to safely assist in this situation would be to have a chair suitable for carrying a person upstairs. Thinking one of those with three wheels on the real "legs" which can be rolled upstairs.

ScotRail158725 said:
The staff can’t be blamed fully if much at all here to be honest. A number of factors here could have caused the staff to not be able to help, as stated the H&S policy stated in the article. Also the passenger is a former rugby player, who are of large builds, and its bot necessarily going to be easy to carry someone like that up stairs especially when they aren’t mobile

This is kind of what I was getting at, I would find it really difficult to watch someone struggle in this way and not step in to help - but if I was a member of station staff on duty I wouldn't want to be liable if something went wrong. The article is certainly written in such a way to suggest that LNWR were incredibly negligent by not carrying the user and chair ("rail staff refused to help") but should instead have focused on the failure to provide alternative methods (if indeed this was not already suggested). I can easily see how they may have suggested lengthy options via Euston for example (not knowing the journey details) as the only alternative and the passenger didn't want to do this.

43055 · 19 Jun 2022

BJames said:
I've just come across this in The Guardian:

I'm inclined to say that a starting point for this is that staff should have been made aware, and in turn made the passenger aware, that this lift was not working before he had alighted, and given an alternative option to complete his journey.

Given this happened on Friday I'm assuming that he was on a train which got terminated short at Milton Keynes due the disruption. Avanti journey check shows the lift is out of use on platforms 5 and 6 which 3 services terminated at platform 5.

NoRoute · 20 Jun 2022

If true, it offers a frightening insight into the health and safety culture of the UK railways, following policy to the letter without the faintest understanding of the underlying principles.

Dryce · 20 Jun 2022

zwk500 said:
My point was that the situation should never have been allowed to develop to the point where the disabled person felt they had no option but to drag themselves up the stairs. The two train companies (and Network Rail) should have had a clear plan to manage the entirely foreseeable situation much better.

I don't think they foresaw the issues between Milton Keynes and Euston.

The real question perhaps is why the lift to platform 6 cannot be reinstated more quickly.

Presumably once things started to go wrong on Friday and the passenger arrived at platform 6 then the situation became an unfortunate fait accompli. No lift. And no services running from platforms 5 or 6 to provide a rather embarrassingly complicated workaround via another station.

The previous day I was on a very late WCML service that was diverted to platform 3 and lost another 10 minutes being held to get in and slowed getting out. I'm guessng reason was a passenger who needed lift access to the platform and couldn't get to platform 6.

DelayRepay · 20 Jun 2022

The article says he was travelling to London, so it's reasonable to assume he was trying to get to Euston and ended up at Milton Keynes due to the disruption. Unless he was trying to change to a Watford Junction service in order to change again, I suppose.

It is not a good situation, but I agree with the posts above that it is unfair to blame the staff. Trying to carry someone up stairs when you are not trained to do so is dangerous and could have a very bad outcome. The only time I would try to do this is if there was an emergency such as a fire and no other option.

Snow1964 · 20 Jun 2022

One place I visited recently had a portable wheelchair mover, like a small tracked robot for climbing stairs with a platform for wheelchair which was operated by a small control pad linked by a spiral cable.

The staff said it had taken few minutes to learn and had been brought in temporarily because their normal lift was out of order.

So the obvious question is if they could deploy a temporary solution, why can’t it be used at Milton Keynes when lifts are out of order. Admittedly there might be be couple of hours from a lift failure to one being delivered to site, but surely it is better than expecting disabled people to drag themselves around.

NSE · 20 Jun 2022

As someone who works with kids, there are so many instances where there’s an obvious solution but I wouldn’t dream of doing it because it’s not approved/I’ve not been trained and it opens me up to a world of accusations if it goes wrong. I can totally understand why platform staff didn’t get involved.

zwk500 · 20 Jun 2022

Snow1964 said:
One place I visited recently had a portable wheelchair mover, like a small tracked robot for climbing stairs with a platform for wheelchair which was operated by a small control pad linked by a spiral cable.

The staff said it had taken few minutes to learn and had been brought in temporarily because their normal lift was out of order.

So the obvious question is if they could deploy a temporary solution, why can’t it be used at Milton Keynes when lifts are out of order. Admittedly there might be be couple of hours from a lift failure to one being delivered to site, but surely it is better than expecting disabled people to drag themselves around.

This. MKC is busy enough and the lifts have been out of order for long enough to justify getting something like this. So LNWR and Avanti need to be asked why it wasn't done.

Watershed · 20 Jun 2022

I wonder whether the passenger had assistance booked. If so, what measures were identified as possible mitigations? I would have thought arranging for trains to be replatformed, or possibly for the train to shunt to a different platform upon arrival, would be appropriate. Of course that depends on the guard knowing that the lifts are out of order.

zwk500 · 20 Jun 2022

Watershed said:
I wonder whether the passenger had assistance booked. If so, what measures were identified as possible mitigations? I would have thought arranging for trains to be replatformed, or possibly for the train to shunt to a different platform upon arrival, would be appropriate. Of course that depends on the guard knowing that the lifts are out of order.

As mentioned earlier in the thread (and I had originally missed), this incident took place on Friday when there were power supply and signalling issues south of Milton Keynes, so it is entirely possible this passenger was originally booked to go to Euston and the stop at Milton Keynes was enforced.

DarloRich · 20 Jun 2022

zwk500 said:
As mentioned earlier in the thread (and I had originally missed), this incident took place on Friday when there were power supply and signalling issues south of Milton Keynes, so it is entirely possible this passenger was originally booked to go to Euston and the stop at Milton Keynes was enforced.

I suspect this is the issue. More should have been done to sort this situation out.

There has been an awful lot of negative social media comment on this.

Watershed · 20 Jun 2022

zwk500 said:
As mentioned earlier in the thread (and I had originally missed), this incident took place on Friday when there were power supply and signalling issues south of Milton Keynes, so it is entirely possible this passenger was originally booked to go to Euston and the stop at Milton Keynes was enforced.

Yes, I realise that - what I'm saying is, if they had booked assistance (and frankly even if they hadn't - with the use of a ramp likely being necessary, it would have been pretty obvious that there was a passenger using a wheelchair), the guard should have been thinking about the arrangements they were going to make for the passenger.

So really this is down to whether the guard was aware of the broken lift. If so, why didn't they think about how the passenger was going to get off the platform? If not, why weren't they aware?

Bletchleyite · 20 Jun 2022

There is certainly one inaccuracy in the story - there are no toilets of any kind on P5/6 where he was stuck, so he wasn't "refused use of them", there simply weren't any. They are on P1/2 and P3/4, though I forget which also has wheelchair accessible toilets, I think 3/4.

They could do with adding (normal and accessible) toilets on 5/6, and accessible toilets on 1/2 if there aren't any there, but that's a side issue.

It isn't reasonable to expect station staff to carry a fully grown adult up a set of stairs (though it might have been nice if they'd helped with his bags once he had chosen to "shuffle" up), and it may not have been possible to get a northbound train to stop there to take him back to Rugby, depending on the nature of the disruption (there were no southbound trains, so a stop order at Bletchley wouldn't have worked). I did talk to a disability activist about this on Twitter and the best we could come up with was to call 999 and get the fire brigade to bring an evacuation stretcher and carry him up, or to have the lift manually wound by an engineer if the fault made that still possible.

DarloRich said:
I suspect this is the issue. More should have been done to sort this situation out.

There has been an awful lot of negative social media comment on this.

The story I saw on it (despite containing other inaccuracies) did state that this was the case. If there wasn't disruption, the fairly easy fix would have been to put him on the next northbound train (where he could use the toilet, too), a stop order at Rugby if it wasn't stopping there anyway, and a taxi back.

yorkie · 20 Jun 2022

Does anyone have more information on the incident? Without additional information, I don't think the article can be deemed a credible source, as there are inaccuracies and omissions.

The article makes no attempt to get answers to the key questions; this is perhaps because the answers would make the article less sensational in nature.

Watershed · 20 Jun 2022

Bletchleyite said:
I did talk to a disability activist about this on Twitter and the best we could come up with was to call 999 and get the fire brigade to bring an evacuation stretcher and carry him up, or to have the lift manually wound by an engineer if the fault made that still possible.

That really does not seem to be necessary or proportionate, and indeed these would all likely have taken far longer. With little or nothing running south of MK, shunting the train to another platform, running it to Bletchley or arranging a SSO at Wolverton on its way back north would have been the logical options.

Bletchleyite · 20 Jun 2022

Watershed said:
That really does not seem to be necessary or proportionate, and indeed these would all likely have taken far longer. With little or nothing running south of MK, shunting the train to another platform, running it to Bletchley or arranging a SSO at Wolverton on its way back north would have been the logical options.

That depends where the blockage was - did it run south at all?

If anyone knows the precise time of this incident it might be possible to use Realtime Trains to work out what may have been possible.

Geezertronic · 20 Jun 2022

Watershed said:
That really does not seem to be necessary or proportionate, and indeed these would all likely have taken far longer. With little or nothing running south of MK, shunting the train to another platform, running it to Bletchley or arranging a SSO at Wolverton on its way back north would have been the logical options.

Do they allow an "evacuation" to another train side-by-side so two trains side-by-side could enable a transfer from one platform to the other?

Bletchleyite · 20 Jun 2022

Geezertronic said:
Do they allow an "evacuation" to another train side-by-side so two trains side-by-side could enable a transfer from one platform to the other?

That would assume it was viable to put a train in both P4 and P5, which if everything was going slow-line due to the disruption may not have been possible.

Article: Wheelchair User Difficulty at Milton Keynes

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