Dr. Joan Eakin is an expert on occupational health and safety (OHS) in small workplaces. She has devoted much of her research career to understanding how working conditions and health-related practices in small firms are shaped by their distinct features and social relations of work. She has also explored the institutional services and regulatory/policy structures that govern them.
This is important research. The majority of workers in Canada and internationally are employed in small and medium-sized enterprises, and protecting the health and safety of these workers continues to pose unresolved challenges to our OHS systems.
Here’s your chance to find out all about that research and its implications. The Institute for Work & Health (IWH) is pleased to announce that Dr. Eakin, professor in the Dalla Lana School of Public Health and director of the Centre for Critical Qualitative Health Research at the University of Toronto, will deliver this year’s Alf Nachemson Memorial Lecture. The lecture takes place on Wednesday, November 25 in Toronto.
Drawing on a series of studies that have included workers, employers, health-care professionals and compensation service providers, Dr. Eakin will challenge some of the prevailing assumptions and approaches to prevention, return to work and service provision to the small-business sector, and suggest how they might be reframed. She will conclude with recent examples of how findings from this research have been taken up by the injured worker community and by Ontario’s Workplace Safety and Insurance Board.
The Alf Nachemson Memorial Lecture was established in 2002 by IWH to honour Dr. Nachemson’s significant contribution to advancing the use of research evidence in clinical decision-making.
2009 Alf Nachemson Memorial Lecture
Dr. Joan Eakin
“No small matter: Unpacking the problem of
health and safety in small workplaces”
Wednesday, November 25, 2009, 5.30 p.m.
Design Exchange, 2nd Floor
234 Bay St., Toronto, Ontario
To register for this free lecture, visit: www.iwh.on.ca/nachemson-lecture.