Our Focus
The Laerdal Foundation supports research with practical value and potential to help save lives.
Our funding is directed toward projects that strengthen evidence, improve education and implementation, and support better emergency care in areas where preventable mortality remains high.
We also fund education research projects at the SAFER simulation center in Norway.
We are particularly interested in research that addresses important knowledge gaps, generates new evidence, and can improve clinical practice, implementation, education, guidelines, or policy.
Our priority areas
The Foundation prioritizes research within the following areas:
- Resuscitation and cardiac arrest.
- Maternal and newborn health.
- Trauma, emergency care and other time-critical or critical conditions.
- Education research at or in collaboration with the SAFER simulation centre in Stavanger.
Strengthening the health workforce
Within our priority areas, we welcome research that explores how education, training, simulation, implementation support, and quality improvement can strengthen health workers, teams, and health services.
This may include research on how to improve competence, performance, retention, quality of care, or implementation of evidence-based practice. Research on health workforce strengthening should demonstrate relevance to one or more of the Foundation's priority areas.
What we look for
In addition to scientific quality, we are particularly interested in research that has the potential to improve care, improve practice and generate evidence with relevance beyond a single project or institution.
- address a clearly defined and important knowledge gap;
- explain what new evidence the research will generate;
- use an appropriate and clearly described research design;
- have the potential to improve survival, health outcomes, or quality of care;
- enable improvement in clinical practice, education, implementation, guidelines, or policy;
- offer relevance beyond the immediate project, institution, or setting;
- involve a research team with the appropriate experience, partnerships, and capacity;
- demonstrate meaningful, local involvement where this is relevant.
Research in low-resource settings
At least 50% of the Foundation’s funding is directed to research relevant to low- and middle-income countries.
We give particular attention to research that:
- addresses important causes of preventable mortality.
- is grounded in local needs and context.
- includes meaningful involvement of local institutions and researchers.
- strengthens relevant local research or implementation capacity.
- can inform improved care in other resource-constrained settings.
Is your research a good fit?
Before applying, please review our full eligibility requirements, exclusions and funding categories.
The How to Apply page explains what we support, what we normally do not support, and the requirements for project, programme, low-resource setting and Bjørn Lind applications.