Image: Global Safety Evidence Centre
Global safety charity Lloyd’s Register Foundation announced on Tuesday the launch of its new Global Safety Evidence Centre, backed by a £15 million ($22.8m) investment over 10 years.
The Centre will serve as a hub for anyone who needs to know ‘what works’ to make people safer in the face of a range of global safety challenges.
It is also inviting researchers and safety practitioners from all over the world to apply for a share of £2 million being made available to support projects that address OSH evidence gaps.
In addition to OSH practitioners and policymakers, the centre aims to support professionals across different high-hazard industries, including the mining and quarrying sector, high-quality and actionable resources and evidence.
According to the Lloyd’s Register Foundation World Risk Poll, one in five workers globally (18%) experienced harm at work in the last two years, and the International Labour Organisation (ILO) estimates this to be the cause of three million deaths annually.
The need for such a centre is demonstrated by two reports published Tuesday, produced by RAND Europe on behalf of the Foundation. The reports – including a systematic review of OSH intervention reviews, and the findings of a consultation with OSH practitioners in high-risk sectors around the world – highlight a worrying scarcity of reliable, high-quality evidence on the comparative effectiveness of different safety measures, and a need to make evidence more relevant and accessible to practitioners in different global and industrial contexts.
“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,” Nancy Hey, Director of Evidence and Insight at Lloyd’s Register Foundation, said in a news release.
“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.”
To address these problems, the new Global Safety Evidence Centre will collate, create and communicate the best available safety evidence from the Foundation, its partners and other sources on the nature and scale of global safety challenges, and what works to tackle them.