What's new

For every person who dies from a work-related traumatic injury, at least six people die from an occupational disease. Fittingly, preventing the work exposures behind these diseases is a priority in many jurisdictions, including Ontario. But to push forward on this agenda, we need to build up our disease and exposure surveillance systems, Occupational Cancer Research Centre (OCRC) Director Dr. Paul Demers noted in his remarks last November at the 2018 annual Alf Nachemson Memorial Lecture, hosted by IWH. His Nachemson lecture is now available as a slidecast.

The Institute for Work & Health (IWH) congratulates Ontario Minister of Labour Laurie Scott for her appointment of Dr. Paul Demers, director of the Occupational Cancer Research Centre in Toronto, to lead a review of the scientific evidence on the role of workplace exposures in causing cancers among Ontario workers. In a letter to the Minister, IWH President Cam Mustard says he expects the review will have influence in provincial jurisdictions across Canada.

A tool designed to measure "two sides of the coin"—OHS systems and culture—developed by Workplace Safety North with Institute for Work & Health expertise, has been endorsed by the Ontario Mining Association, and now is in demand well beyond the province and the sector.

Public consultation is now under way on a draft strategy for building an inclusive workforce—one where people with and without disabilities have the same choices in their jobs and careers. The organizations behind the draft strategy, hosts of the Disability and Work in Canada 2018 conference held last December in Ottawa, are hoping to gather input on the document from as many perspectives as possible.

Congratulations to Dr. Nancy Carnide, who was recently named an associate scientist at the Institute. Previously a post-doctoral fellow at IWH, Carnide was also the recipient of a Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) Vanier Canada Graduate Scholarship and a CIHR Strategic Training Fellowship in Work Disability Prevention. Her current research interests focus on substance use and mental health problems among working populations.

It had a five-year plan that included building a culture of safety across the province. What it was missing was a definition of safety culture—and a way to measure any progress made. That was when SAFE Work Manitoba turned to IWH and its work on occupational health and safety leading indicators. In this impact case study, we look at how the IWH Organizational Performance Metric is helping SAFE Work Manitoba achieve its goals.

In 2013, Ontario’s Workplace Safety and Insurance Board (WSIB) put two of IWH’s Seven ‘Principles’ for Successful Return to Work into practice when it introduced changes to the medical assessment service offered at its Regional Evaluation Centres. The new service integrates return-to-work (RTW) planning and enhances communication among health-care providers, the WSIB and the employer, with the worker’s participation. In a new impact case study, we look at the difference in recovery and RTW outcomes after the changes were put in place.

From violence to cannabis legalization to mental illness, policy-makers and occupational health and safety practitioners are challenged to stay on top of emerging societal issues that also affect the workplace. We summarize our research work on these big issues and more in the Institute’s 2017 Annual Report, now available to download.

It’s such a crucial time in one’s life, those early years when young adults find their first jobs and start making their way in the working world. For young people with a disabling health condition, it can be a frustrating time of finding barriers at every turn. What programs can help these young adults enter the labour market? In a recent IWH Speaker Series presentation, Dr. Arif Jetha shared findings from a systematic review. 
 

Ridicule and belittlement, gossip and back-stabbing, unclear job expectations, unfair treatment, relentless work demands. Research shows that psychosocial work conditions such as the above are as serious as any other safety hazard. That was why the Occupational Health Clinics for Ontario Workers (OHCOW) set out to create a tool to help workplaces tackle psychosocial hazards. And IWH was happy to lend its tool development expertise.

Research suggests that 380,000 Canadians are exposed to silica dust at work and, each year, 200 new cases of lung cancer in Ontario can be attributed to silica dust exposure. In this IWH Speaker Series presentation, Dr. Emile Tompa looked at the costs and benefits of two types of silica dust prevention strategies: use of personal protective equipment or use of engineering controls (i.e. the wet method). His presentation is now available as a slidecast.  

If you’re confused by seemingly duelling headlines about the negative health effects of prolonged sitting and prolonged standing, we’ve got a video for you. It just so happens that two of the scientists behind these headlines work at the Institute for Work & Health. We put them before the camera, side by side, to sort out the take-away message.

Disability and Work in Canada 2018, taking place December 3-4, 2018 in Ottawa, will engage delegates in reviewing and building consensus around a proposed national strategy to improve the level of employment among people with disabilities in Canada. The conference is being hosted by the Disability and Work in Canada Steering Committee, which includes among its members a number of executive members of the Centre for Research on Work Disability Policy, a pan-Canadian, multidisciplinary research centre established in 2014 and headquartered at the Insitute for Work & Health.

New researchers with an expertise in social, behavioural, organizational, clinical and/or population health sciences are invited to apply for a post-doctoral Mustard Fellowship in Work & Health. The Institute is looking for recent PhD graduates with an interest in doing research related to one of its two overarching priorities: work as a determinant of health and health as a determinant of work. The deadline for applications is Friday, December 14, 2018.

The Fall 2018 issue of At Work is now available. Inside this issue: promising strategies to reduce the misuse and abuse of prescription opioids, a round-up of the external grants awarded to Institute scientists, the Institute's role in the development of a toxic workplace screening tool, and more. If you didn't get your issue in your inbox, download the PDF here.

Since the start of the opioid crisis in the late 1990s, communities across North America have tried many different strategies to curb the misuse and abuse of prescription opioids. In an open-access systematic review, an IWH team analyzes the effectiveness of the studied strategies, identifies the most promising ones, and points out unintended consequences. 

Recreational cannabis is now legal in Canada and many employers are concerned about the potential implications for workplaces. In this IWH Speaker Series presentation, Dr. Nancy Carnide shares early findings of a survey, conducted in June 2018, on patterns of cannabis use at work and workers' perceptions of such use. 

Health conditions such as depression, Crohn’s disease and HIV have at least one thing in common. People with these conditions can be in good health for long periods of time and then experience bouts of debilitating symptoms. These recurring and hard-to-predict episodes can make asking for, and providing, workplace accommodation a challenge. Now, Dr. Monique Gignac is leading research aimed at making conversations around accommodation easier, thanks to funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) and Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR).

Despite advances in clinical care, millennial young adults with rheumatic disease continue to face challenges finding work and staying productive at work. Workplace policies can help overcome these challenges, but too often they’re aimed at older adults. An IWH study is currently under way to understand what supports millennials with rheumatic disease need from employers. This survey is a first step. Please help us get it into the hands of young workers with lupus, juvenile arthritis, scleroderma and other forms of rheumatic disease. Click on the survey or find out more about this project.

Do men and women with arthritis have different workplace accommodation needs? And do they differ in their access to workplace supports to meet these needs? A study published by IWH’s Dr. Monique Gignac recently examined these questions. It found unequal levels of access to support, which can be explained by the types of work that men and women do.

We are seeking a research analyst for a 12-month, full-time contract to be part of a project examining the concept of occupational health and safety (OHS) vulnerability across provinces. Deadline for applications is Friday, October 5.

A study examining the business case for employing people with mental illnesses found a net benefit in each of the workplaces in which an accommodation cost-benefit evaluation was conducted. For employers, the economic benefits ranged from two to seven times the costs incurred. For the accommodated workers, they ranged from four to 12 times the costs.

The financial costs of work-related injury and illness may be well known, but limited information is available on what employers spend to control or eliminate the causes of work-related injury and illness. A new Issue Briefing describes the results of a 2017 study to estimate occupational health and safety expenditures among employers from 17 economic sectors in Ontario, Canada.

A supervisor’s supportive reaction to an injury—for example, by expressing empathy and reassurance instead of skepticism and blame—significantly increases the likelihood that the injured worker will successfully return to work. That’s according to a recent study conducted by a research team at the Institute for Work & Health (IWH) and Australia’s Monash University. 

Two early-career researchers have been awarded the 2018/19 S. Leonard Syme Training Fellowships in Work & Health. The two fellows are Corey McAuliffe, PhD candidate in social and behavioural health sciences at the University of Toronto’s Dalla Lana School of Public Health, and Julia Goyal, PhD candidate in public health and health systems at the University of Waterloo’s School of Public Health and Health Systems. Congratulations Corey and Julia. We look forward to working with you.

Women working in Ontario’s education sector are four to six times more likely than their male counterparts to require time off work because of being physically assaulted on the job. This is according to a study by the Toronto-based Institute for Work & Health (IWH), recently published online in Occupational and Environmental Medicine.

The Institute’s Alf Nachemson Memorial Lecture takes place this year on November 28. The lecture will be delivered by Dr. Paul Demers, director of the Occupational Cancer Research Centre (OCRC). In this role, Demers has been working with colleagues and collaborators across the country to develop and improve the surveillance of work-related cancers, establish their human and economic burden, and draw on research to develop policy recommendations aimed at preventing exposure. The event, to take place at the Design Exchange in downtown Toronto, is free and open to the public.

Women who work 45 hours or more a week face a 63 per cent higher risk of developing diabetes than women who work 35-44 hours. Among men who work long hours, however, the incidence of diabetes tends to go down. This is according to a study by the Institute for Work & Health (IWH) and Institute for Clinical Evaluative Sciences, which followed a sample of 7,000 Ontario workers over 12 years. The findings, published in July in an open access article in BMJ Diabetes Research & Care, highlight the importance of work and health research that includes sex/gender-based analyses.