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High-hazard industries: Addressing safety culture, climate and leadership to improve outcomes

Doors open 4.30 pm.
Lecture 5.00 p.m.
Reception 6.00 p.m.

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

Linda Goldenhar
CPWR—The Center for Construction Research and Training

Targeting high-hazard sectors is one of the key priorities in the Ontario Ministry of Labour (MOL)’s occupational health and safety (OHS) strategy. One of those sectors is construction. Although the construction sector makes up only 6.7 per cent of Ontario’s employment, it accounts for about 30 per cent of all work-related traumatic fatalities and occupational disease fatality claims in the province.

To address the sector’s high fatality and injury rate, the MOL released its Construction Health and Safety Action Plan in May of this year. The first recommendation in that plan is to create a culture and climate of safety within construction to promote the importance of OHS.

Dr. Linda M. Goldenhar, Director of Research and Evaluation at CPWR—The Center for Construction Research and Training in Silver Spring, Maryland, is an expert in the safety culture and climate of construction workplaces. Her extensive research in the U.S. construction sector has culminated in practical tools to improve safety outcomes through improved safety culture, climate and leadership.

What can we learn here in Ontario from this research? Come find out at this year’s annual Alf Nachemson Memorial Lecture, hosted by the Institute for Work & Health (IWH). Dr. Goldenhar, this year’s invited speaker, will talk about the research that led her team to develop, first, a workbook to help strengthen jobsite safety climate by improving performance in eight areas identified as leading indicators of health and safety outcomes and, more recently an online tool that assesses a workplace’s safety climate maturity. Dr. Goldenhar will also share preliminary evaluation findings of a program that she and her team developed to improve jobsite supervisory leadership—one of the eight safety climate leading indicators identified as critical by construction stakeholders.

Join us for an evening of learning and discussion as Dr. Goldenhar explores the exciting prospect of improving outcomes in high-hazard industries such as construction by improving safety climate and safety leadership. You won’t want to miss this annual lecture, one of the most important networking events of the year in Ontario for policy-makers, researchers, employers, workplace representatives and other stakeholders in the field of work injury and disability prevention. 

Watch slidecast

About presenter

For the past five years, Dr. Linda M. Goldenhar has been the Director of Research and Evaluation at CPWR—The Center for Construction Research and Evaluation in Silver Spring, Maryland. She is currently the lead investigator at CPWR on a project creating leadership training for frontline supervisors, called Foundations for Safety Leadership (FSL). She is also the lead on CPWR’s safety climate initiative, which has resulted in Worksheets and Rating Tool to Help You Strengthen Jobsite Safety Climate and the Safety Climate Assessment Tool (S-CAT), both designed to help construction worksites evaluate and strengthen their safety climates.

Before joining CPWR, Goldenhar received her PhD in public health from the University of Michigan and began her career in occupational health and safety as a research psychologist at the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) in Cincinnati, Ohio. While there, she focused her research on a variety of construction-related issues, including tradeswomen’s safety and health concerns, worker perceptions of the ideal amount of overtime, and more. She also served as NIOSH’s construction coordinator and leader of the Intervention Effectiveness Group. In 2005, after having left NIOSH in 2001, she was invited to be a member of the National Academy of Science’s review of NIOSH’s construction program.

Goldenhar has published over 65 peer-reviewed publications, published numerous articles in trade magazines, and written book chapters and manuals. She has presented her work at many national and international academic and construction-specific conferences.

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.