About
Delivering health and safety benefits through a data-driven global community
Vision
Imagine a world where no one dies as a consequence of work, where industry doesn’t suffer catastrophic failure, where companies can say that no one was harmed in the making of their product and where accidents can be predicted and therefore prevented
Strategic aim
Central to the Discovering Safety programme is the development of new techniques to analyse data and aggregate data from sources worldwide, the key output being new learning to help prevent future accidents occurring.
The programme will work with industry, academics and governments from the global community, generating bespoke solutions for local contexts, including the challenges faced in developing countries.
It will be built around the creation of a global knowledge resource comprising HSE’s comprehensive accident and incident investigation information, which spans the majority industries and covers the past 40 years. This will be augmented by other rich sources of information from across the globe.
Once assembled, users will be able to access a research and development environment to discover novel ways to exploit health and safety data. The knowledge resource will be mined and analysed by our experts to gain deep understanding of why, and how, safety and health failures occur around the world.
The outputs will be disseminated through an international programme of training, education, and practical solutions, that will improve global health and safety performance, resulting in many lives saved, and a safer working world.
More Information
Delivering health and safety benefits through a data-driven global community
Objectives
This long-term programme of work will seek to better understand the global health and safety landscape, its challenges and how best to access and use data to develop solutions for maximum benefit. It will apply expertise in data science, data analytics, artificial intelligence and machine learning to health and safety contexts, advancing areas such as text mining and natural language processing, which will have important spin-off benefits; and it will seek to make a real difference from the insights, through education, practical improvement initiatives and commercial tools and services.
To collaborate with industry, trade groups, international networks, governments and academia other stakeholders to identify health and safety challenges and new and emerging risks where better use of health and safety data might help
To develop the new analytic tools and techniques for analysing health and safety data and generating insights, along with the effective approaches for sharing insights across programme stakeholders.
To bring together and exploit HSE and other health and safety data sources for the maximum benefit of the programme
To ensure the programme is sustainable in the longer term through the commercial exploitation of select outputs where feasible
To demonstrate that the programme is achieving its goals and delivering tangible benefits across the global health and safety community
Outcomes
The Discovering Safety programme has been designed to be international scope in order to achieve impacts that are equally global in reach, delivering benefits to health and safety systems in both emerging economies and the developed world.
Specific outcomes of the programme will be:
For emerging economies
Lessons learnt and agreed best practices garnered from past operating experiences in developed countries, resulting in accelerated performance improvement.
For more mature health and safety systems
Intelligence on new and emerging risks and more effective ways to mitigate risks, to break through observed plateaus in performance.
More generally
Breaking down of sector silos and associated barriers to learning, move away from reactive health and safety, enhanced ability to be more proactive.
Key Benefits
Reduction in incidence of injuries, non-injury accidents, and cases of work-related ill-health
Reduced financial costs of lost work time, plant downtime & risk of prosecution, more awareness of regulatory responsibilities
More evidence based risks management and targeting of controls, move away from one-size-fits-all health and safety
Enhanced ability to measure health and safety performance and demonstrate improvement and benefits of interventions
Better awareness of what good risk control looks like, what’s feasible from a health and safety performance perspective
Cross fertilisation of thinking as to best ways to control risks, between organisations and sectors sharing similar risks
Enhanced ability to predict when future health and safety failures might happen and therefore the opportunity to prevent them
Stimulation of more innovative thinking as to how health and safety problems are addressed
Greater awareness of the intrinsic value of what good risk control looks like
Discovering Safety mission
This long-term programme of work will seek to better understand the global health and safety landscape, its challenges and how best to access and use data to develop solutions for maximum benefit. It will apply expertise in data science, data analytics, artificial intelligence and machine learning to health and safety contexts, advancing areas such as text mining and natural language processing, which will have important spin-off benefits; and it will seek to make a real difference from the insights, through education, practical improvement initiatives and commercial tools and services.