With the holiday season fast approaching, the staff at OHSAH are working hard to continue making healthcare a healthier place to work - into 2008 and beyond. Look for the next issue of the Health & Safety E-Update in your inbox, January 30, 2008.

The 4th PEARS Provincial Meeting will be hosted at the Hospital Employees’ Union provincial office in Burnaby on Thursday, November 29th and Friday, November 30th. The first day will be a collective gathering of over fifty participants from across all PEARS programs in BC. Day One will comprise of presentations on various provincial and national initiatives related to PEARS, and will foster a learning environment for provincial counterparts to network and share ideas in working group activities. The presentations on the first day will include the following:

• New developments at OHSAH and PEARS, by Dr. Jaime Guzman, OHSAH
• Economic evaluation of workplace interventions for health and safety, by Dr. Emile Tompa, Institute of Work and Health
• PEARS and the restructuring of workplace health at Fraser Health, by Leslie Allan Reed, Fraser Health
• Unit and Organizational Level Change in BC Healthcare, by Dr. Elizabeth Smailes, OHSAH
• The Early Days: Past reflections as PEARS moves forward, by Marty Lovick, Health Sciences Association of BC

The second day will consist of a province-wide bipartite working group that will be meeting to discuss the strategic direction of PEARS for the upcoming years. These discussions will be centered in revising the proposed provincial-wide strategy plan for PEARS for the next 5 years, focusing on topics surrounding governance and expansion, continuous improvement, and evaluation and research.

This provincial gathering will make for another exciting meeting and hopefully shape and guide PEARS for its future years.

For more information about PEARS,
please visit the OHSAH website.

OHSAH’s Research in Progress is a trans-disciplinary leadership forum designed to stimulate the mobility of ideas across the different departments, disciplines, and inter-disciplines in occupational health and safety science and practices at OHSAH. These seminars encourage participants to engage in a critical and comparative dialogue that transcends their own current field of scholarship and offers an opportunity to continuously expand and apply expertise.

Research in Progress involves both the internal presentation of OHSAH scientists’ working projects and by inviting external speakers to present, including: university professors, worldwide recognized scholars, and applied researchers. Two recent speakers to have presented at these sessions have included:

David Kalman, Ph.D.
Chair of Environmental and Occupational Health Science,
University of Washington
“An overview of health care occupational safety research and outreach at the University of Washington School of Public Health”

Emile Tompa, M.B.A. Ph.D.
Staff Scientist at the Institute for Work & Health,
Toronto, Ontario
“Economic Evaluation of Workplace Interventions
for Health and Safety”

For more information about OHSAH's Research in Progress forums, please contact Dr. Hasanat Alamgir at hasanat@ohsah.bc.ca or by phone at 778.328.8013

In the past few months, OHSAH has been busy presenting research, promoting program awareness, and supporting its partnerships with institutions and organizations throughout the province. In particular, OHSAH’s director of Statistics & Evaluations, Dr. Hasanat Alamgir, has been leading the way. Through the sharing of recent publications and research findings, Dr. Alamgir has focused on creating awareness about BC healthcare workers’ health and safety while attempting to initiate more joint research projects between university professors and OHSAH scientists. Some of his recent presentations have included:

• Allergy and irritation incidents among healthcare workers.
  Health Care Safety Professionals Association of BC; Nov, 2007
• Health Care BC: Occupational health and safety research.
  Seminars in Population and Public Health, Simon Fraser University; Oct, 2007
• Evidence-based decision making to improve healthcare workplace safety.
  Seminar at School of Health Information Science, University of Victoria; Oct, 2007
• Workplace health and safety of BC's healthcare workers.
  Seminar at School of Environmental Health, UBC; Oct, 2007
• A Surveillance System to monitor the occupational health of British Columbia's Health Care Workforce.
  Rounds at Health Care and Epidemiology, University of British Columbia; Sept, 2007
• Occupational Health and Safety of BC’s healthcare workers.
  Seminar at Health Sciences Programs, University of Northern British Columbia; Oct, 2007

Dr. Alamgir is responsible for providing statistical and evaluation expertise and inputs to OHSAH’s programs and research. He is also an Adjunct Professor at SFU’s Faculty of Health Science and UBC’s Institute of Asian Research. He has a PhD in Epidemiology from UBC, an MBA from Texas A & M University and a Masters in Pharmacy from Dhaka University. He has published a series a research articles on BC’s healthcare workers in the world’s leading journals, including American Journal of Industrial Medicine, Occupational and Environmental Medicine, and American Journal of Infection Control. He will be also teaching a course on Injury and Disability at SFU starting in the Spring of 2008.

For more information, Dr. Alamgir can be contacted via email at hasanat@ohsah.bc.ca, or by phone at 778.328.8013.

OHSAH’s Mental Health and Organizational Development department is proud to announce that the Changing the Workplace project has completed the baseline survey of the study. Thank you to all the frontline healthcare workers that participated and provided their feedback. In total, 854 participants completed the 40-minute telephone survey for a 79% response rate. The survey measured aspects of workplace stress, such as Work-Life Imbalance, Role Overload, Perceived Quality of Care, and Leadership. A brief report reviewing the survey results will be released in December. Please look for postings on our website in the following weeks.

Looking forward to 2008 we will begin the Intervention phase of the project on the randomly selected intervention units. Frontline workers on these units will be presented their unit level results from the survey and will be asked to select an attainable goal for improvement in their workplace. We expect the intervention to start in Winter 2008 and last at least until Summer of that same year.

To find out more about the study, please visit the OHSAH website.