Illness/injury prevention

About 100,000 new businesses with one or more employees are created each year in Canada. Almost all start out as small businesses, which have been shown to carry high risks of injuries and fatalities. This study sets out to understand how occupational health and safety management is initiated by new businesses. Its aim is to fill in a research gap and help the prevention system in Ontario reach and support new businesses early in their lifecycle.

Status: Ongoing

Published: Labour, June 2024

Published: American Journal of Industrial Medicine, May 2024

Published: Canadian Journal of Public Health, April 2024

A key program from Construction Health and Safety New Zealand—developed using IWH research—takes a participatory ergonomics approach to better prevent and manage musculoskeletal injuries among construction workers.

Published: February 2024

Precarious employment has become more common in the Canadian labour market, as well as in the labour markets of other high-income countries. In this presentation, Dr. Faraz Vahid Shahidi examines the consequences of precarious employment for health and safety at work. Drawing on compensation claims data from the Workplace Safety and Insurance Board and labour force estimates from Statistics Canada, Dr. Shahidi asks whether workers exposed to precarious employment – such as temporary, part-time, and low-wage jobs – are more likely to experience an occupational injury or illness. As a further source of evidence, he also assesses the impact of precarious employment on the workplace transmission of COVID-19.

Published: February 2024

To what extent did workplace exposures account for the transmission of the COVID-19 virus during the first two years of the pandemic? A new study by IWH combined data sources to estimate work-related infection rates, using a method that took into account major shifts in where people worked. It found the role of work exposure changed from wave to wave, in a dynamic pattern not in keeping with the number of cases in the general population.

Published: February 2024

Published: Occupational & Environmental Medicine, February 2024

The COVID-19 pandemic shone a light on the importance of having accurate data on workplace exposure to infectious diseases. Efforts to estimate infection rates of COVID-19 during the public health emergency were hampered by inadequate information on key factors, such as whether an infected worker had worked from home or interacted with the public. In this presentation, Dr. Peter Smith shares results from a study that examined the risk of work-related COVID-19 infections. He discusses methods used by the team to combine data sources to take into account changes in labour market participation—including working from home—during different phases of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Published: January 2024

Published: American Journal of Public Health, January 2024