Lloyd’s Register Foundation’s World Risk Poll finds that one in five workers globally (18%) experienced harm at work in the last two years, with the International Labour Organisation estimating this to be the cause of 3 million annual deaths.
Better evidence on cost-effective interventions is needed by occupational safety and health (OSH) practitioners to tackle this, with research published yesterday (21 May) by RAND Europe highlighting a worrying scarcity of reliable, high-quality evidence on the comparative effectiveness of different safety measures.
To this end, 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, including workplace accidents and injuries.
Along with offering OSH practitioners and policymakers support, the Global Safety Evidence Centre aims to help professionals across different high hazard industries, including the manufacturing sector, by providing them with actionable resources and evidence.
“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,” explained 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.
“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”.
The Centre is now inviting researchers and safety practitioners from all over the world to apply for a share of £2 million to help fill these evidence gaps.
They are specifically seeking those working on projects that address OSH evidence gaps, as well as broader safety science work, such as how to measure and value safety and prevention, and how to learn from past failures and fatalities.
“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,” added Nancy Hey, director of evidence and insight at Lloyd’s Register Foundation.
“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.
“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.”
