The new Global Safety Evidence Centre aims to support professionals across different “high-hazard” industries, including the construction sector, with high-quality and actionable resources.
Lloyd’s Register Foundation plans to invest £15m in the new centre over the next 10 years.
According to the Foundation’s World Risk Poll, one in five workers globally (18%) has been injured at work during the past two years. The International Labour Organisation estimates that nearly three million workers die every year due to work-related accidents and diseases.
Research published by RAND Europe on behalf of the Foundation highlights what it says is a worrying scarcity of reliable, high-quality evidence on the effectiveness of different safety measures, and a need to make evidence more relevant and accessible to those responsible for health & safety.
Nancy Hey, director of evidence and insight at Lloyd’s Register Foundation, said: “Evidence is critical to improving the safety of people and property. Without it, we cannot fully understand the nature and scale of safety challenges faced by people around the world, nor what works to protect them from harm.
“However, around the world and across industrial sectors, many professionals, policy and decision-makers who need to consider safety do not have access to sufficient high-quality evidence either because it does not yet exist or because it has not been collated and communicated to them in an understandable and actionable form.”
The Centre is inviting researchers and safety practitioners from all over the world to apply for a share of £2m made available to support projects that address shortcomings in occupational health & safety knowledge.
“We are keen to partner and collaborate with other researchers, analysts and funders, professional and trade bodies, and most of all, safety practitioners, whose knowledge and expertise we need to harness – not just to identify evidence gaps, but as part of the evidence base itself on how to reduce harm,” added Hey.
Martin Cottam, chair of the Global Safety Evidence Centre’s expert advisory panel and former chair of the ISO technical committee on occupational health and safety management, added: “I’m delighted to see this important initiative from Lloyd’s Register Foundation coming to fruition. As safety practitioners we are presented with a sometimes bewildering range of tools and methods with which to manage safety risks, but often without much evidence to demonstrate their effectiveness, or evidence of the conditions under which they are more or less effective. The work of the Centre will help safety practitioners navigate this landscape, enabling them to be confident in selecting approaches that have been shown to deliver real safety improvement.
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