London — In an effort to support its plans to establish a Global Safety Evidence Centre, the Lloyd’s Register Foundation sought to find out how safety professionals use information or “evidence” in their work.
On behalf of the foundation, researchers from RAND Europe interviewed 29 safety and health pros in high-risk industries from around the world. The researchers asked about the evidence that participants may need from a range of sources, including regulations, data, analysis, expert advice and peer knowledge. They also explored how safety pros prefer to access this evidence.
Among the key themes to emerge from the interviews:
- Safety and health pros use their own experiences as evidence, but want more kinds of information.
- No single source of accessible and trusted information exists.
- Evidence can help build safety cultures, but more evidence is needed to know what makes those safety cultures effective.
- Safety pros use a wide range of evidence for different purposes.
- Safety pros need support to access and use information.
- Emerging evidence needs to be reliable, especially in relation to climate change and new technologies.
“The experiences and voices of practitioners are essential to understanding what matters and what works in occupational safety and health,” the foundation says. “Evidence is needed to assess these and is useful to practitioners in supporting safe and healthy workplaces, especially in high-risk sectors.”
