From my end, while Marc was managing the safety aspect and the train operations aspect of this issue, I was handling the HR side and the disability management. In terms of disability management, you may be aware that one of the rules is that the longer the employee stays off work, the fewer chances there are that the employee is coming back to work. After three months, it is a critical moment for the employee to be able to return to work in a successful manner.
When we started in 2010, we had a few cases, and we needed to think from the perspective of how VIA would be able to bring the employees back to work in a safe manner. Marc already talked about peer support. He talked about the EAP provided. There are another couple of things I would like to add in terms of disability management.
We have a specialized nurse on trauma and grief, who has been helping us for the last three or four years. She is the liaison with workers' compensation. She supports employees with the paperwork and with the processes. She is going to be doing the link with treatment centres. She identifies needs for treatments and locates those centres that can help our employees. At the end of the day, she accelerates the return to work of our employees.
Again, without going into too much detail on those other two project initiatives Marc mentioned, in the last couple of years we've been using a firm in Montreal that uses neuro-feedback: brain mapping and neuro-feedback training. This is something that has been used by the U.S. Army for several years already to help their veterans who are coming back from conflict and suffering from PTSD. For the last couple of years, we have been using it with a couple of our locomotive engineers. After a very few sessions, they are coming back to us and saying that the results are incredible. In regard to the before and after of those sessions, the feedback we are receiving from them is very significant.
For the very last thing, it is my understanding you have a graph before you. This is the summary of what we've been doing for the last three or four years in terms of results. The number of incidents, as Marc was referring to, remained stable. We are talking about 14 or 15 incidents a year, times two locomotive engineers, so we're talking about 30 cases. What we are measuring here is the number of claims and the absences, the number of claims to workers' compensation or CSST, and the average duration of their absences.
You can see that in 2009 we had nine cases. The average duration of the absence was 271 days, for a total of 2,500 days lost that year. Then we see what we can call an anomaly in 2013, where there was a big incident, a big collision where six people died that day. That is the reason that can explain that peak, but you can see that in the last two years, 2014 and 2015, we almost don't have cases or claims to workers' compensation. Actually, for the last one we had in 2015, the employee didn't miss a day.