Illness/injury prevention

The term “vulnerable workers” is used increasingly in occupational health and safety (OHS) to describe those at greater risk of injury. Research at the Institute for Work & Health (IWH) has recently explored whether worker or workplace factors are linked to worker vulnerability. The result is a new 29-item questionnaire that measures the extent to which workers are at increased risk of work-related injury and illness and conceives vulnerability as a function of four distinct dimensions.

Published: OOHNA Journal , October 2015

The eight-item IWH-OPM is adopted in several provinces as a measure of health and safety performance in workplaces

Published: August 2015

Published: Accident Analysis and Prevention, June 2015

An IWH study found strongly diverging trends in the annual incidence of occupational injury and non-occupational injury among working-age adults in Ontario from 2004 to 2011. This Issue Briefing highlights opportunities to improve the monitoring of injury across Canada.

Published: June 2015

29-item survey gauges vulnerability via workplace hazards, policies, procedures and worker awareness.

Published: April 2015

Workplaces and jurisdictions are looking for valid, reliable and practical indicators of occupational health and safety (OHS) performance. In light of this, OHS professionals from prevention system partners in Ontario, in collaboration with the Institute for Work & Health (IWH), developed a leading indicator known as the IWH Organizational Performance Metric (IWH-OPM). Prior testing of the eight-item IWH-OPM suggests it has acceptable internal consistency and structural validity, and is also predictive of future OHS performance (as measured by claims rates). In this plenary, Dr. Basak Yanar, a researcher and lecturer in organizational behaviour at the University of Windsor, reports on a further qualitative study of the IWH-OPM that contributes to the ongoing analysis of its measurement properties. The construct validity of the IWH-OPM was examined through case studies in five organizations, comparing the item and scale scores with observational and interview data on OHS performance. Results indicate good construct validity; that is, organizations that scored high on the scale also had the best OHS practices compared to those that scored lower on the scale.

Published: April 2015

The term "vulnerability" is used increasingly in occupational health and safety (OHS) in Ontario. Although certain groups in the labour market (e.g. younger workers, temporary workers or immigrants) are often labelled as “vulnerable workers,” there is very little discussion about what the broader workplace and occupational factors are that lead to increased risk of injury among these groups, and whether these risk factors are similar across the groups. In this plenary, Dr. Peter Smith, a scientist at the Institute for Work & Health, provides an overview of the conceptual framework of OHS vulnerability. He also shares preliminary findings from a survey capturing different dimensions of OHS vulnerability across a sample of workers in Ontario and British Columbia.

Published: January 2015

In 2014, Ontario legislated mandatory health and safety awareness training for all workers and supervisors. How effective was this training in its early days in reducing vulnerability to risk of work injury? IWH researchers answered this question.

Status: Completed 2018

How much are Ontario employers investing in health and safety in their workplaces. An IWH research team went right to the source, surveying Ontario employers about their firm-level spending on five dimensions of health and safety.

Status: Completed 2017

Brookfield Johnson Controls turns to the IWH-OPM after deciding to shift focus away from lagging indicators.

Published: December 2014