Discovering Safety
Derbyshire, England
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Discovering Safety
Derbyshire, England
“SAVING THE LIVES OF WORKERS. USING DATA TO DRIVE DOWN HEALTH AND SAFETY INCIDENT RATES GLOBALLY.”
Dr Helen Balmforth
Discovering Safety Programme Director
“Over half a million workers are injured every year in the UK, with over a hundred tragically losing their lives. The effect these incidents have on the lives of family, friends and colleagues are extensive” says Helen Balmforth, who is leading Discovering Safety. “We must find a way to keep reducing health and safety risks to workers. Where incident rates are consistent year-after-year, data can help get us back on track.”
For Discovery Safety – a Health and Safety Executive (HSE) initiative funded by Lloyd’s Register Foundation – that new approach has meant bringing together safety data on an almost unimaginable scale. “HSE has been gathering facts on workplace accidents and incidents for nearly 50 years, including over 175,000 new reports every year” adds Helen. “By supplementing that with data from industry stakeholders, we have access to over 1.7 terabytes of data. That’s the equivalent of around 2,000 filing cabinets of information.
The aim of Discovering Safety is to translate all that data into meaningful insights that can be used to prevent risks and ultimately save lives. “It’s a huge task and we know we can’t do it on our own, so we work closely with our partners from academia and industry, as well as with the Foundation. So far we have worked with 250 key stakeholders across 21 countries” explains Helen.
Beginning in 2017, the Foundation’s involvement helped the project take its first steps and is now supporting six innovative and groundbreaking workstreams that focus on developing new data and analytical techniques to better understand and reduce health and safety risks to workers. Discovering Safety has an initial focus on the UK construction industry but shares knowledge and new techniques globally.
“This is a massive programme that’s going to make a difference to health and safety on a truly global scale,” says Helen. “That might sound like a hugely ambitious goal, but it’s absolutely achievable if we use innovative techniques to open up the wealth of data available to us.”
