A comparative and cross-jurisdictional research program on work and health

This project seeks to improve our means of developing social, economic, and workplace policies that improve worker health and reduce worker health inequalities. It builds on existing 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 is to expand current comparative research in order to develop an enduring policy and practice network that creates research and data infrastructure and a knowledge exchange and mobilization node that will support improved practices.

This program builds and extends data and research partnerships among researchers, compensation boards, and 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 forum and group 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 between different countries.
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.
5. Utilize the policy and researcher network to effectively translate the results into policy and practice.

The vision of this research program is to advance our understanding of work-related disability and facilitate the translation of results into policy and practice.