Impact
40 years and 2,000 projects
Since 1980, the Laerdal Foundation has supported over 2,000 research projects. The Board believes a number of the projects the Foundation has been privileged to fund have contributed to helping save lives.
Utstein meetings
The Foundation has supported more than 35 Utstein meetings over the years. The focus has been to establish common nomenclature and global guidelines for reporting data on survival, and also to identify best practice implementation models.
Safer Births
The Foundation has supported the development of the Helping Babies Survive and the Helping Mothers Survive programs, as well as research related to the implementation of these programs. A prime example of this is the Safer Births program in Tanzania.
Center and Program support have been awarded to over 30 research groups
This category furthermore encompasses:
- Full or partial support for the completion of close to 140 PhD degrees in Scandinavia and 100 PhD degrees outside of Scandinavia
- Support to the establishment of the International Liaison Committee on Resuscitation (ILCOR) and the European Resuscitation Council (ERC)
- An annual Bjørn Lind research stipend granted to education research project conducted in association with the SAFER center in Stavanger
- Funding of the Åsmund S. Laerdal memorial lectures at the annual meetings of the Society of Critical Care Medicine in the US and the biannual meetings of the Scandinavian Society of Anesthesiology and Intensive Care Medicine (SSAI)
Examples of projects
Acute Care Action Network
The Laerdal Foundation has co-funded the initial phase of WHO's Acute Care Action Network, a network of 50+ organizations committed to improving emergency, critical, and operative care services in low-resource settings by scaling up WHO's tools, resources, and best practices.
Sepsis in low-resource settings
In 2024, the Society for Critical Care launched a seven-year initiative to reduce sepsis mortality in low-resource settings, with early phases funded by the Laerdal Foundation.
The project will identify needs, summarize evidence, and address knowledge gaps, leading to the creation of practical toolkits. Later phases will focus on implementing, scaling, and evaluating impact across 20 global regions.
Global Resuscitation Alliances
The Global Resuscitation Alliance was formed in 2015 to develop best practices and guidelines to remedy the geographical disparity in cardiac arrest survival from cardiac.
Its mission is to advance resuscitation through the Resuscitation Academy model by accelerating community implementation of effective programs through a quality improvement strategy to measure and improve.
The promising development of the Global Resuscitation Alliance for out-of-hospital cardiac arrest has led to the expansion of the concept to several new areas, that the Foundation has supported:
An In-hospital Pediatric Resuscitation Alliance was launched in 2022.
10 steps for Improving In-hospital Cardiac Arrest was developed and published in 2023, and a Global Resuscitation Alliance for in-hospital cardiac arrest will be established.
A Global Resuscitation Alliance for newborn resuscitation was established in 2024.
Saving lives at birth
The Foundation has supported the development of the Helping Mothers and Babies Survive programs, and research related to the implementation of these. A prime example of this is the Safer Births program in Tanzania.