Shaping a smarter tomorrow
Working together to deliver RSA's Corporate Social Responsibilty Strategy
Accidents can change lives. In England in 2017 over 780,000 people were seriously injured or killed in accidents at home, on the road or at work – many of them preventable. We’ve worked with the RSA Group by combining our skills and experience to create a programme of activities designed to raise awareness, educate, and empower those most at risk of accidents to live safer, active lives.
As one of the world’s leading insurance groups, RSA provides general insurance products and services to private and commercial clients in over 140 countries. From its origins safeguarding communities after the Great Fire of London, to modern day online, water and road safety, RSA has been helping protect its customers for over 300 years.
Our partnership
We’ve established a long-term strategic partnership in support of RSA’s corporate responsibility strategy ‘Confident Futures’, which focuses on ‘Shaping a smarter tomorrow’. Through this partnership, we’ve supported RSA activities which help people and businesses to get ahead of risks through education, awareness-raising and encouraging behaviour change. It is about helping people better understand the risks they face so that they can adjust their behaviour to mitigate them.
Enabling Safety
Across England, there are 240,000 accident-related hospital admission episodes among people aged 25–64 each year. Our core adult years, ages 25 to 64-years-old, are often associated with caring responsibilities for statistically more vulnerable age groups at either side of them; including both their children (particular under-5s at risk in the home, and teenagers, including young drivers) and parents (over-65s at risk from falls in the home and driving-related accidents).
This partnership demonstrates that we have a shared interest in understanding the effects of accidents on the working-age population, and in October 2019, we began research to explore the causes and impact of accidents amongst different audience groups.
We appointed Professor Allyson Pollock, Director of the Institute of Health and Society in the Faculty of Medical Sciences, Newcastle University, to oversee the research; assisted by Graham Kirkwood, Senior Research Associate at the Institute of Health and Society, Newcastle University, and Neil Pollock, Masters graduate from LSE.
The research culminated in the publishing of the ‘Enabling Safety’ report in October 2020 which;
- Outlined how accidents affect under-5s in the home, 17-25-year-olds on the road and over-65s at home and the road
- Presented insights on the public perception of accidents, including those who have caring responsibilities for others
- Highlighted possible actions that could prevent accidents among each of the key groups.
“Raising awareness of issues and changing behaviours through education is at the heart of RSA’s Confident Futures strategy and our ambition to shape a smarter tomorrow. Our partnership with RoSPA is an important part of that journey. Together we aim to raise awareness of the simple steps we can all take that allow us to live safer, more active lives. This research is a start point, helping us to identify those who are most at risk of harm, understand the barriers to action and ways we can overcome them.”
Karl Helgesen
Chief Clims Officer, CR Executive Sponsor - UK & International, RSA
Falls Prevention Web Hub
Accidents in the home and on the road are a leading cause of harm among over-65s. More than 9,000 people aged over-65 die as a result of an accident each year and there are more than 430,000 accident-related hospital admissions among this age group.
The next stage of the partnership was to develop a programme that will empower and enable those most at risk of falls in the home to live safer, active lives.
In November 2020, we launched a brand new Fall Prevention web hub, full of advice, information, videos and downloadable resources via the RoSPA website. By making free tools and information available, we can help more people to stay safe. Since the launch of the falls prevention web hub, we’ve had thousands of page views and engagement from people across the UK.
Five online roadshows took place from November 30 – December 4 to give people in later life, their families and falls prevention practitioners the opportunity to find out more about building exercise into a daily routine. All the information covered in the roadshows is available on the Fall Prevention web hub. Following the roadshows, we conducted a survey amongst our attendees and found that:
- Those in later life regularly doing strength and balance exercises rose by 37 per cent
- Those in later life that knew what to do to prevent falls at home rose by 19 per cent
- Those that felt comfortable with talking to family and friends about strength and balance rose by 9 per cent
- Those that knew where to go for further information rose by 31 per cent
- 95 per cent of practitioners said that they felt confident in talking to their clients about falls prevention and 92 per cent felt confident talking about strength and balance exercises following the roadshows, up from 78 per cent and 74 per cent respectively before the roadshows.
RoSPA Fall Fighter
Following the success of the strength and balance roadshows, we’re delighted to have worked with RSA to launch the ground-breaking Fall Fighter initiative with the aim of tackling the UK’s biggest forgotten killer – falls in the home.
Every year more than a third of people over the age of 65 (and half of those over 80) have a fall that requires hospital treatment, costing the NHS and wider healthcare system more than £2.3billion every year. These falls have devastating consequences on people’s lives from physical injuries and death to trauma, poor mental health, loneliness, social isolation and loss of independence.
The new Fall Fighter movement is designed to educate and empower people of all ages, transforming each of them into a “Fall Fighter” who can then help family, friends and others in their communities prevent falls. By empowering people of all ages with the understanding of why falls happen, who they affect, and what they can do to prevent them, we can all help prevent falls from happening.
After launching in October 2021, hundreds of individuals have become Fall Fighters through our free e-learning and live virtual classroom courses. Organisations across the UK have also been getting involved, by encouraging their employees to become Fall Fighters, by downloading the free SCORM compliant e-learning files to upload to their own e-learning system.
“Working with partners means we can achieve so much more and that is why we are delighted to be collaborating with RSA.
“RoSPA and RSA are organisations with people at their heart and our association has the potential to make a real difference to the lives of those most vulnerable to accidental injury.
“We are also committed to basing our activities on a solid evidence base, and that is why this report – the fruit of the early part of our joint working – is so important. It contains insights from injury data and research into public perceptions of accidents that will guide the next stage of our partnership – developing an intervention that will empower and enable those most at risk of accidents to live safer, active lives.”
Errol Taylor
Chief Executive, RoSPA
Looking to the Future
Following the success of the Fall Fighter movement, we’re now working with RSA to develop further initiatives to reach RSA Group’s wider external communities.
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Get in touch
Interested in working with us as a partner? Our Partnerships are forged with organisations that share our guiding values and principles. Bespoke projects are crafted to meet and reflect both organisations’ ambition to go beyond safety excellence.
Start your journey with us today by contacting our Partnerships department
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