Research Profile - Putting Workplace Injuries on the Map

A Canadian researcher pinpoints work injury hotspots across the country

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What causes workplace injuries such as falls, burns and cuts? The surprising answer is that the reasons behind hazardous work conditions and unsafe work practices may not be the same in Vancouver as in St. John's, even for workers doing identical jobs, says Dr. Curtis Breslin.

The researcher with Ontario's Institute for Work and Health is a leader in identifying geographical and gender differences in workplace injury rates across Canada. These differences, he says, are important clues to the underlying local causes of workplace injuries.

"Workplace injuries often get solely attributed to the behaviour of the worker when in fact there are usually systemic causes related to unsafe work conditions," says Dr. Breslin. "These causes can differ across a province, or the country, and between men and women."

In a 2007 study, the first of its kind, he uncovered substantial geographic differences in rates of injury among Canadians aged 15 to 24. For example, young workers in Saskatchewan have the highest, and Ontario the lowest, rates of workplace injury. This even applies in identical industries, such as the service sector. The study found these differences weren't only influenced by work conditions. It revealed that in some cases, lower work injury rates are related to greater residential stability – how often workers change where they're calling home.

In exploring geographic variations, Dr. Breslin is also considering gender.

"The labour market is very gender segmented, and this has a major influence on the types of injuries Canadians experience," says Breslin. Women are overrepresented in clerical and administration positions, while industrial and manual labour jobs are held primarily by men. Female-dominated jobs often involve the risk of repetitive strain injuries, while men's jobs include higher risk of cuts, burns and falls.

However, even for men and women doing the same job, gender can play an important role in who gets hurt. For example, Dr. Breslin has found that gender affects how individuals perceive workplace risk.

In one study, he found that while women emphasized how their complaints were actively disregarded by their superiors, younger men – and some women in male-dominated settings – described how they stifled their complaints in order to appear mature among their older co-workers.

"Risk appraisal is a very complicated concept because it is dependent on cultural, and in part gendered, norms of what's acceptable risk and what's not acceptable risk," says Dr. Breslin.

The Study

With support from CIHR's Institute for Gender and Health, Dr. Breslin is putting Canadian workplace injuries on the map – literally. He's creating detailed maps of rates of workplace injury in the hope of identifying regional hot spots.

"There's something about a picture of a map, and different colours to tell you what's going on, that communicates something that (numbers in) tables don't quite capture," says Dr. Breslin.

Dr. Breslin says that the criteria for worker compensation claims, the usual basis for assessing rates of injury, vary widely across Canada. Thus, his study, to be completed by 2011, is using the more consistent data from the Canadian Community Health Survey combined with socio-economic information from Statistics Canada. The study team includes health researchers, geographers and a statistician.

Injury rates will then be compared with a broad number of factors including regional rates of unionization and unemployment, and even such components as whether there's a link between injuries and the number of children workers have.

There's already broad interest in the study's results among Dr. Breslin's industry and government and non-government partners.

"Occupational health and safety organizations are very keen to have the kind of surveillance monitoring information that we're gathering that will help them develop a strategic plan to reduce workplace injuries," Dr. Breslin says. "So it's exciting for us to have a study that addresses both theoretical questions and that has real practical implications."