The Global Safety Evidence Centre: a golden opportunity for all of us working in occupational safety

In a world too often dominated by short-term thinking, it is refreshing and exciting to see Lloyd’s Register Foundation’s long-term commitment to evidence-based safety made manifest in the establishment of the Global Safety Evidence Centre.

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 as to their effectiveness. New approaches emerge, and existing methods are refined, attracting advocates and supporters. Commercial interests play their part in shaping the conversation.

Yet it is relatively rarely that we are presented with objective evidence of the effectiveness of such methods, whether in absolute terms or relative to alternative approaches. It is even rarer to find information telling us under what circumstances or in what context a tool or method is likely to be more or less effective.

Perhaps because it has always been this way, it seems as if, until recent times, there has been little demand for such data to be generated. Safety practitioners have grown accustomed to making choices about tools and methods without such evidence, relying more on anecdotal feedback or past experience to guide our choices.

Perhaps the fact that safety is increasingly subject to scrutiny and reporting by company boards is playing a part in the growing demand for evidence of the effectiveness of the tools and methods in which organisations are asked to invest.

The impact of standards

One pertinent example of this absence of data relates to the effectiveness of occupational health and safety (OHS) management systems based on the international standard ISO 45001:2018 or its predecessors.

Over recent decades, hundreds of thousands of organisations across the globe have invested time and effort in aligning their management systems with the requirements of these standards, which are widely regarded as encapsulating good practice. Yet it is only in the last five years that we have seen the emergence of research providing objective evidence as to whether organisations that make this investment deliver better subsequent OHS performance than comparable organisations that do not.

However, even this new evidence is geographically very limited and somewhat contradictory, with only two of the three studies reporting a significant improvement in OHS performance among organisations implementing an ISO 45001-based management system

Hopefully, these findings will stimulate discussion and further studies to provide a clearer picture of the extent to which, and under what circumstances, a management system will enable organisations to deliver superior OHS performance. This information would be invaluable both to those operating an OHS management system, and to the thousands of people around the world who contribute to the development of the international standard.

Of course, this is just one of many areas in which safety professionals would benefit from access to evidence of the effectiveness of different types of safety intervention.

Our evidence journey

The desire for reliable, applicable evidence is not something that can be satisfied overnight. It is a long-term direction of travel, of which all of us, as safety practitioners, need to be aware.

It is also something to which we can all contribute, by making sure we gather and share data on the effectiveness of the tools and methods we use. By doing so, we can help build up the evidence base on which we will all be able to draw in the future when considering which tools and methods to deploy, and building our business cases for the necessary investment. Ultimately, this will help us all be confident in selecting approaches that have been shown to deliver real safety improvements.

Given the position from which we start, the Global Safety Evidence Centre will cast the net wide when defining the types of evidence that it will seek to curate and make available. While the ideal would always be to have validated objective evidence, we will not dismiss the evidence that practitioners can offer from their personal experience – particularly when we are able to bring together the experience of large numbers of users.

We also know that it will be important to take a global approach to evidence gathering, because approaches that work well in one cultural context may work less well in another. Data on such variations will help organisations which operate globally, or operate global supply chains, to better understand the likely effectiveness of their safety interventions in different geographic or cultural contexts.

And so, there is a golden prize here for all safety practitioners as, over time, we bring together a repository of evidence on the effectiveness of different safety interventions. The challenge is how this can be done at pace, which in turn means exploring how we can most effectively engage with the global safety community to draw on practitioners’ experience. We would welcome your thoughts on how you could contribute to this process.