| Year Funded: 2010 | Budget: | Funding Agency: Institute for Work & Health (IWH) |
|---|---|---|
| Title: | Methods for Surveillance of Work Injury by Time of Day in Ontario (IWH Project 1185) | |
| Category: | Occupational Disease, Injury and Health Services | |
| Subcategory: | Occupational Health Services | |
| Keywords: | work injury, shift work, prevention | |
| Link to research website: | www.iwh.on.ca | |
Issue:
Shift work – employment with anything other than a regular daytime work schedule – is a large part of work in the Canadian economy. About 25% of full-time workers aged 19-64 in Canada worked shifts in 2005. Research evidence has identified a number of potential health risks associated with shift work. There is particularly strong evidence that night, evening, rotating and irregular shifts are associated with an elevated risk of occupational injury. In Ontario, there is currently no adequate method for monitoring the differences in work injury risk according to the time period of work. This project will address this gap in occupational health surveillance capacity by developing methods to estimate the association between the rate of work-related injury and time of injury for labour force participants in Ontario for the period 2004-2008. This project will evaluate emergency department encounter records as a source of information for the surveillance of work-related injury and illness in Ontario.
Objectives:
The goals of this project are:
• to compare the incidence of work-related injury and illness presenting to Ontario emergency departments to the incidence of worker’s compensation claims filed with the Ontario Workplace Safety and Insurance Board over the period 2004-2008,
• to use both data sources to estimate the incidence of work-related injury in relation to time of day of injury occurrence.
Anticipated Results:
The results of this work are expected to identify characteristics of workers, occupations, industries and injury events that are associated with the risk of work injury by time of day. These findings will be of interest to prevention authorities. Prevention authorities will also be interested in a detailed assessment of the validity of emergency department records as a source of surveillance information on the health of workers in Ontario.
Investigators:
Cameron Mustard, Peter Smith (Institute for Work & Health)
