Safety In SAR

#SaferSAR Overview

Why #SaferSAR Matters to You?

The #SaferSAR initiative is designed to improve safety at sea by encouraging SAR professionals to share lessons learned from incidents and accidents. Currently, no global system collates SAR unit data, analyses it for trends or safety risks, and disseminates this information to the SAR community. Through the #SaferSAR platform, SAR organisations can gain valuable insights into safety risks, identify patterns, and share best practices with others around the world, ultimately enhancing operational safety and saving more lives at sea.

Benefits to SAR Organisations

As a SAR Organisation, promoting the #SaferSAR system to your crews offers several key advantages:

  1. Improved safety awareness: Through reporting the safety issues, the SAR crew becomes more aware of the risks that are present, which helps them to anticipate challenges and adopt safer practices.
  1. Global knowledge sharing: Participating in the #SaferSAR initiative will connect your crews to a global network of SAR professionals, facilitating the exchange of lessons learned and best practices. This collaboration will help strengthen the overall safety culture within your organisation and beyond.
  1. Support for under-resourced organisations: Organisations that may not have the capacity to collect and analyse safety data themselves will benefit from the shared findings. By contributing to this initiative, your organisation will not only improve its own safety standards but also help elevate safety practices for smaller or under-resourced SAR units globally.
  1. Exclusive access to key findings: As part of the #SaferSAR project, the IMRF will produce a Global Maritime SAR Safety Bulletin several times a year, providing in-depth analysis and insights from the collected data. Member organisations will have free access to this publication, as well as opportunities to participate in online safety workshops and awareness campaigns based on the key findings.

How to Get Involved?

We invite all SAR organisations to encourage their crews to actively participate in the #SaferSAR reporting system. The platform is fully operational, and every report submitted contributes to a safer maritime environment for all. By sharing your organisation’s experiences, you will help us develop a deeper understanding of safety risks, identify trends, and improve SAR operations globally.

For any incidents or accidents your crews have encountered, please submit your reports through the form available here. Your participation is vital to the success of the initiative and the future of global maritime safety.

If your organisation has a functioning reporting system, we encourage you to consider automatically linking the received reports to the #SaferSAR database. Whilst retaining strict anonymity and data privacy, this will allow a larger global database of safety incidents, which can be, for instance, used to observe trends that would not be visible within the national dataset with fewer observations.

#SaferSAR Journey

The #SaferSAR initiative began with a 12-month feasibility study for a globally accessible platform that SAR personnel and organisations can use to share lessons and best practices identified in SAR response, incidents, accidents, and exercises. The objective of the initiative is to improve safety at sea by fostering collaboration and knowledge-sharing among SAR professionals worldwide. The initiative is funded by Lloyd's Register Foundation (feasibility study) and Trinity House Department for Transport Fund.

Despite numerous marine accident investigation branches worldwide, including the United Kingdom's Marine Accident Investigation Branch (MAIB) and Germany's Bureau of Maritime Casualty Investigation (BSU), there is currently no global system that collates SAR unit incidence data, analyses it for trends, patterns, or safety concerns, and disseminates these findings globally. By sharing data and experiences in our own incidents and accidents more effectively, global SAR organisations can develop a deeper understanding, identify safety risks and trends, and implement safer operations, ultimately saving more lives. The initiative also aims to assist organisations that lack the resources to collect such information themselves, further promoting safety at sea.

Sharing lessons is one of the key functions why the IMRF exists as an organisation, bringing together world’s maritime SAR organisations and developing SAR capacity around the world. The project is therefore at the heart of our functions as an organisation. With the pilot project we established, in relation to data on incidents and accidents occurring in SAR units, the nature of sharing culture within the maritime SAR community, the key barriers and potential value of sharing information, and the potential design options of a global information sharing system.