MSFHR Scholar Award to Chris McLeod

May 2016: Our co-director Chris McLeod is a 2016 Michael Smith Foundation for Health Research Scholar Program award recipient for his comparative and cross-jurisdictional research on work and health. His work will explore the development of social, economic, and workplace policies that improve worker health and reduce health inequalities over the working life course. Expanding on existing collaborations, Chris will work with national and international researchers, compensation boards, and work disability insurers from Canadian provinces, Australia and New Zealand to understand work disability and return-to-work management, and develop intervention mechanisms that can effectively prevent and reduce the burden of work injury and disease. More about our research in this area.

Award details: A Comparative and Cross-Jurisdictional Research Program on Work And Health

My program of research concerns how we can develop social, economic, and workplace policies that improve worker health and reduce health inequalities over the working life course. This program builds on existing national and international research and stakeholder collaborations and is structured around a series of comparative and cross-jurisdictional studies on occupational health and safety and workers’ compensation.

The broad aim of this research program will be to expand current comparative research funded by CIHR and various workers compensation boards in order to develop an enduring policy and practice network that creates research and data infrastructure and a knowledge exchange and mobilization hub that will support further comparative studies and facilitate the translation of results into policy and practice.

This program brings together national and international researchers and compensation boards and work disability insurers from Canadian provinces, Australian states and New Zealand. It has five objectives:

      1. Build and expand the network of compensation boards, researchers and other stakeholders to create a network that can identify, guide and inform the focus of the cross jurisdictional policy comparisons;
      2. Expand the current comparative cross-provincial dataset on workers’ compensation to include all Canadian compensation boards’ data and a broader set of comparable variables;
      3. Work with international partners to create a more limited set of comparable data that would permit comparisons across a range of international jurisdictions;
      4. Conduct policy-relevant, hypothesis driven research with the comparative data to examine differences in and the effectiveness of different approaches to improving work disability outcomes; and,
      5. Utilize the policy and researcher network to effectively translate the results into inform policy and practice.

This research will improve our understanding of effective work disability and RTW management and provide evidence on the mechanisms through which we can effectively intervene in preventing and reducing the burden of work injury and disease. This research program will advance our understanding of work-related disability in British Columbia, Canada and internationally. It innovates by developing and extending comparative methods and by building and extending data and research partnerships that will have long-standing and practical impact.

a place of mind, The University of British Columbia

School of Population and Public Health
2206 East Mall,
Vancouver, BC, V6T 1Z3, Canada
Tel: 604-822-2772
Partnership for Work, Health and Safety
2206 East Mall,
Vancouver, BC, V6T 1Z3, Canada
Tel: 604-822-8544

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