Lloyd’s Register Foundation, the global safety charity, has launched its new Global Safety Evidence Centre, backed by a £15-million investment over ten 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, including workplace accidents and injuries.

In addition to occupational safety and health (OSH) practitioners and policymakers, the centre aims to support professionals across different high-hazard industries, including the mining and quarrying sector, through the provision of high-quality and actionable resources and evidence.

According to the Lloyd’s Register Foundation’s 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 yearly.

The need for such a centre is demonstrated by two reports published on May 20, 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, as well as a need to make evidence more relevant and accessible to practitioners in different global and industrial contexts, the foundation points out.

“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,” says Lloyd’s Register Foundation evidence and insight director Nancy Hey.

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, the foundation states.

To kickstart this process, the centre is inviting researchers and safety practitioners from across the world to apply for a share of £2-million being made available to support 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.

“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,” says Hey.

“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,” adds Global Safety Evidence Centre expert advisory panel chairperson and International Organisation for Standardisation technical committee on occupational health and safety management former chairperson Martin Cottam.

“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.

“I’m excited to be involved in the Global Safety Evidence Centre’s expert advisory panel and look forward to working with panel members to help the centre achieve its objectives for the benefit of the global safety community,” he continues.

Further outputs due to be published by the centre in the coming months include a report on the growing impact of emerging technologies – including virtual reality training, AI and robots – on workplace safety.

The centre will also publish a report on the relationship between climate change and OSH – an important priority for the ILO.

“Lack of data remains one of the biggest challenges to improving workplace safety worldwide — it’s the fourth major gap identified in national OSH systems by ILO member States.

“In many regions, research on the scale of the problem is also still scarce. The launch of the Global Safety Evidence Centre marks a vital step forward in closing this gap,” says ILO branch chief responsible for OSH and the working environment Joaquim Pintado Nunes.

As well as offering funding to external organisations, the Global Safety Evidence Centre is currently recruiting data analysts, research (trials and reviews) managers, and project and stakeholder managers to grow its in-house capacity.

Qualified candidates with an interest in improving safety are encouraged to apply through the Lloyd’s Register careers platform.