Lloyd’s Register Foundation today launches its six-year strategy to tackle the world’s biggest safety challenges, and announces a new Evidence and Insight Centre to identify the sectors and areas of the world most in need of safety interventions.
The global safety statistics are startling:
- 374 million workers have non-fatal work-related injuries each year, resulting in more than 4 days off work.
- Every day, 6,200 people die from a work-related accident or disease.
- Every year, there are 600 million cases of foodborne disease diagnosis, just under half of these result in death.
- 100 ships are lost every year at sea.
The new centre will be based in London and is the first of its kind globally to focus solely on safety and risk. This new global safety observatory will identify gaps in knowledge in order to fund and encourage better data collection, it will also generate evidence from the data that does exist to kick start new interventions. The centre will build a network of data holders, researchers, and partners with a role in developing safety standards and regulations.
The centre’s announcement is part of the Foundation’s new six-year strategy, also launched today, which aims to tackle these astonishing global statistics by:
- Establishing the best evidence and insight to understand the complex factors that affect safety, for example the new World Risk Poll conducted by Gallup and the creation of the new Evidence and Insight Centre itself.
- Focusing on the most pressing challenges where there is clear evidence and a compelling need for change, for example, safety at sea, food safety and the safety of our physical infrastructure.
- Building global coalitions for change with organisations around the world who share the Foundation’s values and vision for improving safety and driving down the number of accidents and deaths. For example, encouraging engineering companies to sign up to a new data sharing manifesto developed with the Open Data Institute to improve safety in the sector.
Richard Clegg, CEO at Lloyd’s Register Foundation, said:
“Our strategy starts with evidence – we will strive to understand the complex factors that most affect safety. Our interventions will be driven by evidence of what works – in fact, we plan to build the world’s best centre for safety evidence and insight which others can use. We want to have a big impact, so we are focusing on a few big challenges with big goals, for example, making the sea safer, making food safer and improving society’s understanding of risk.”
Sarah Cumbers, Lloyd’s Register Foundation’s Director of the Evidence and Insight Centre, said:
“We’re determined to make a real change in the world around us, that means understanding where there are gaps in safety data, and where unsafe practices are continuing. Only then can we formulate and fund the right interventions with our partners. I’m proud to be heading up the first global centre for safety evidence and insight, which will play a tangible part in driving down preventable deaths around the world.”