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Research priorities
Generally, we consider projects that fall within WorkSafeBC's mandate of:
- Occupational injury and disease prevention
- Fair compensation
- Successful rehabilitation and return-to-work
Specific research priorities for the program are grouped under the following five themes:
- Occupational disease, injury and health services
- Intervention research
- Compensation, disability management and return-to-work
- Changing nature of work and work environment
- Transferring research knowledge to the workplace
Within the general priorities noted above, the Board of Directors has identified a list (shown below) of specific issues of concern. The list includes the priority items from 2007, but is expanded to include high risk accident types (special funding), compensation/rehabilitation issues relating to the assessment of prosthetic devices, the rights of seasonal agricultural workers under the Workers Compensation Act , and claim and injury information on workers of marginal populations.
Research Needs and Relevance
The Board of Directors of WorkSafeBC wants to ensure that research funded through the research program addresses real needs of the organization and its partners, and of employers and workers in workplaces. The Board of Directors wants to ensure that the research provides tangible, even quantifiable benefits where possible, by helping to identify potential solutions to real problems. In order to help researchers focus on these issues, the following questions are included in the application forms:
- What is the problem to be solved and how will the research attempt to solve the problem?
- How will the research be done?
- Why is the research important and how does the research support WorkSafeBC and/or its partners mandate?
- How will we know if the research has been successful in solving the problem?
The Research Secretariat will facilitate access to WorkSafeBC’s policymakers for researchers who wish to discuss potential projects.
2008 Research Priorities
Reducing the frequency of accident types that result in large numbers of serious injuries
- Fall to lower level
- Struck by object
- Fall on same level
- Caught or compressed by equipment or object
- Struck against object
Societal change in occupational health and safety
- Influencing general attitudes to workplace safety
- Changing high risk behaviours
Emerging occupational diseases
- Infectious diseases
- Work-relatedness of neurological diseases
Compensation/Rehabilitation issues
- Evidence-based treatment or management of chronic pain (including cognitive behavioral therapy)
- Assessment of whether the current approach to compensation adequately reflects the impact of chronic pain on workers' earning capacity
- Employability assessments — six-month follow-up to determine the outcome for workers
- The impact of disability management companies on claims and return to work
- To what extent are serious work-related injuries, diseases and deaths under-reported?
- Why do people with asbestos-related illness not file claims?
- To what extent are work-related fatalities, as recorded by hospitals and vital statistics, reflected in WorkSafeBC data?
- Are work-related injury rates among ethnic minorities in B.C. proportional to their representation in the workforce?
- What impact does the survival of a serious (non-permanent disability) work-related injury have on subsequent claims experience?
- Assessment of prosthetic devices – comparative functional outcomes
- Are seasonal agricultural workers aware of and acting on their rights under the Workers Compensation Act and corresponding regulations?
- Worker population profiles – claim and injury comparisons
- Do injury and claim rates among workers with temporary work visas in B.C. compare differently with the general population of workers in B.C.?
- Are there differences in the population of those whose claims are initially denied from the population of those whose claims are initially accepted?
Prevention issues
- Implications of key shifts in the economy (e.g. changing employment relationships) for the workers' compensation system in B.C.
- Measurement of safety culture/climate or other leading indicators of safety at the firm, sector, or economy-wide level
- Evaluation of prevention initiatives at the sector or economy-wide level
- Joint Health and Safety Committees — compliance and effectiveness
- Do workers with first-aid certificates have fewer work-related injuries?
- Substance abuse and its impact on safety — the effectiveness (or not) of mandatory testing
In addition to the above priority items, the Workers' Compensation Board of Nova Scotia has identified the following areas of interest:
- Impact of worker health and safety centres
- Environmental scan of national occupational health and safety education curriculum
- Cross-industry study of effective leading indicators, or strategies, for prevention
- Impact of ergonomic-type injuries on the Nova Scotia healthcare system
- Significance of fatigue to workplace injury and times (during a work period) that injuries occur
- Effectiveness of incentive and disincentive initiatives (including provincial Certificates of Recognition)
Alberta Employment and Immigration has also identified the following areas of interest:
- Occupational cancers – causation, number of actual incidences of work-related cancers versus number of incidences claimed/paid through workers’ compensation
- Motor vehicle fatalities – investigations, causes, incidences
- Health and safety in the retail sector
- Best practices in health and safety in the public sector
- Occupational disease tracking systems – identifying exposures, collection of accurate incidence data