OEH Seminar Series: Leading Indicators
March 2017: PWHS Research Manager Billy Quirke will give a presentation about applying the IWH organizational performance metric in the BC long-term care and manufacturing sectors at SPPH OEH Rounds on Friday, March 31, at noon.
WSIB grant success: Early and sustainable return-to-work in the construction sector
March 2017: The Workplace Safety and Insurance Board (WSIB) of Ontario has awarded a grant to our co-director Chris McLeod to improve return-to-work outcomes in the construction sector, by exploring international best practices, identifying indicators of good performance in BC, Alberta, and Manitoba, and assessing WSIB Work Integration policies and practices.
Stakeholder meetings in Alberta
March 2017: Chris McLeod and Suhail Marino travelled to Alberta this month to meet with stakeholders at Alberta Labour and the Alberta Workers Compensation Board. They presented on the COR evaluation and our provincial comparative work on return to work after injury.
Coming to Canada: Novel study sheds light on immigration status and workplace health
February 2017: Niloufar Saffari’s MSc thesis work on return to work after injury for immigrant workers is featured in WorkSafeBC’s e-Newsletter Insight. Read the story here.
Working with stakeholders to use evidence to inform policy
January 2017: Our Co-Director Chris McLeod is in Ottawa and Montreal this month presenting our work to stakeholders at Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada on Jan. 26 and Institut de recherche Robert-Sauvé en santé et sécurité du travail on Jan. 27. More
Congrats to UBC November graduates
November 25, 2016: PWHS student Niloufar Saffari graduated from UBC today after successfully defending her MSc thesis in August.
WorkSafeBC launches asbestos campaign
November 2016: WorkSafeBC has launched an asbestos awareness campaign for homeowners. Find out how to know if you have asbestos in your home, and how to safely deal with it during renovations.
IWH Plenary: Return to work not a single event
November 2016: Chris McLeod will give a plenary talk at the Institute for Work & Health in Toronto on Nov. 15.
Canadian Association for Research on Work and Health Conference
October 2016: Partnership Co-director Mieke Koehoorn, Research Manager Billy Quirke, postdoctoral fellows Robert Macpherson and Wei Zhang, and PhD student Amy Hall are attending CARWH 2016, Oct. 16-18, in Toronto, Ontario, to present on interprovincial, gender, and immigration-related differences in disability duration after work injury, gender differences in return to work trajectories, effects of chronic disease on work productivity loss, and opportunities for intervention in shiftwork practices.
New funds to extend COR evaluation
October 2016: WorkSafeBC has provided funds to assess and develop the BC Construction Safety Alliance’s Occupational Health and Safety Certificate of Recognition (COR) audit database, in preparation for a future investigation of the effect of the COR program on firm injury claim rates. The Alberta Ministry of Labour has awarded funds to evaluate the effect of COR on firm-level injury rates in Alberta through the OHS Futures Research Funding Program. More about our COR evaluation
WDPI 2016 conference
September 2016: Co-director Chris McLeod is presenting work on return-to-work trajectories at the Work Disability Prevention and Integration Conference in Amsterdam, on Sept. 26. Comparative policy research we are involved in is also being presented by our colleague Alex Collie of Monash University in Melbourne. More about our work in this area
WAHE 2016 conference
September 2016: Co-director Chris McLeod and our former visiting professor Ute Bultmann are giving a session on methods for analyzing working life trajectories at the Work, Age, Health and Employment Conference at the University of Wuppertal in Germany, on Sept. 20. Read the related article.
Mustard Post-Doctoral Fellowship in Work & Health
September 2016: The Institute for Work & Health is accepting applications until Nov. 18, 2016. The Fellowship supports the development of outstanding new researchers in the field of work and health.
EPICOH 2016 Conference
September 2016: Partnership Co-director Chris McLeod and Research Manager Suhail Marino are at EPICOH 2016, the 25th Annual Epidemiology in Occupational Health Conference, September 4-7, to present on comparative analyses of work disability duration, leading indicators of health and safety performance, data access and linkage, and differences in disability duration between immigrant and Canadian-born workers.
Chronic conditions, absenteeism, and associated costs in Canada
September 2016: Partnership postdoctoral fellow Wei Zhang measured the relationship between chronic diseases and work absenteeism and calculated associated costs, finding that mood disorders and back problems are associated with substantial work productivity loss. Read more in the Scandinavian Journal of Work, Environment & Health or in a summary from SPPH.
Postdoctoral fellowship opportunity
July 2016: PWHS Co-Director Mieke Koehoorn and Associate Professor John Calvert (Faculty of Health Sciences, Simon Fraser University) are seeking Expressions of Interest for a one-year postdoctoral fellowship funded by the Centre for Research on Work Disability Policy (CRWDP). The funded postdoctoral position will be located at Simon Fraser University and will focus on the Canadian work disability policy system.
