Illness/injury prevention

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

An IWH study on the effectiveness of Ontario's mandatory training was helpful to the labour ministry in several ways—including in reinforcing the value of program evaluations.

Published: November 2023

Among recent organized efforts to make jobsites safer, working-at-heights training has been effective, reports an Institute for Work & Health (IWH) study. As Adam Freill reports, in the three-year period after Ontario made working-at-heights training in the construction sector standardized and mandatory, study authors explain that the rate of fall-from-height injuries leading to time off work fell by 19 per cent.

Published: On-Site Magazine, November 2023

Published: November 2023

In 2015, the Ontario government implemented a working-at-heights (WAH) training standard to ramp up fall prevention efforts. An IWH study team has now gathered two additional years of data on the effectiveness of this training requirement—both on work practices and injury rates.

Published: November 2023