No small matter: Unpacking the problem of health and safety in small workplaces

Lecture starts 5:30 p.m.
Reception 6:30 p.m.

Design Exchange
234 Bay Street, 2nd Floor
Toronto, Ontario

Joan Eakin
University of Toronto

Most workers in Canada and internationally are employed in small and medium-sized enterprises. Ensuring health and safety in such workplaces presents enduring and unresolved challenges to occupational health systems. Dr. Eakin’s research has examined how working conditions and health-related practices in small workplaces are shaped by their distinct features and social relations, and by the regulatory and service environment that governs them. Drawing on a series of her studies, Dr. Eakin will “unpack” some prevailing assumptions and approaches to prevention, return to work and service provision to this sector, and suggest how they might be reframed. She will al so describe how the injured worker community and Ontario’s Workplace Safety and Insurance Board have used this body of research.

About presenter

Joan M. Eakin is Professor in the Dalla Lana School of Public Health and Director of the Centre for Critical Qualitative Health Research at the University of Toronto, and Senior Adjunct Scientist at the Institute for Work & Health.

About the Alf Nachemson Memorial Lecture

The annual Alf Nachemson Memorial Lecture honours the significant contribution of Dr. Alf Nachemson to the use of research evidence in clinical decision-making. Dr. Nachemson was a distinguished orthopaedic surgeon and researcher from Sweden, and a founding member of the Institute for Work & Health’s Scientific Advisory Committee.  The lectureship is awarded to a prominent national or international individual who has made a significant and unique contribution to evidence-based practice or policy-making in the prevention of work-related injury, illness or disability.