New tool helps province work safer

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Employers and employees in Saskatchewan now have a new tool to help them in their efforts to prevent workplace injury and illness, thanks to the Worksafe Saskatchewan program.

Worksafe Saskatchewan is coordinated through a partnership between Saskatchewan Labour and the Worker's Compensation Board. The program initially got off the ground early in 2001.

"Saskatchewan Labour is actually responsible for administration of the Occupational Health and Safety Act in Saskatchewan, and the Worker's Compensation Board deals strictly with the worker's compensation system, so that's how our two organizations are kind of meshing on this program," explained Judy Orthner, manager of communications and research with WCB, and a WCB representative on the Worksafe steering committee. "Both of us have a similar interest in workplace injury and illness prevention in the province. So from feedback from our stakeholders, it was brought to our attention that there was a lot of duplication of services throughout Saskatchewan for various work safe, at work injury prevention programs. So what the objective of Worksafe Saskatchewan is to coordinate these efforts to reduce the duplication of services and to bring greater attention to the importance of a culture of safer workplaces in Saskatchewan."

The Worksafe Saskatchewan program is comprised of a number of different components, the first of which has its official launch in February.

The Worksafe Saskatchewan Web site (http://www.worksafesask.ca) offers up a wealth of information on the subject of workplace injury prevention, with about 600 different topics to chose from. The site also includes links to other organizations involved in workplace safety promotion.

The information available on line has also been packaged in a CD-ROM, Orthner explained.

"The intention there is if you're out in the field, say for example, a lot of companies, say construction companies, a lot of people actually out on construction sites, who'll be working out of trailers and stuff like that, may not have all of the amenities of a real office right at their fingertips. So they wouldn't have access to the Internet, possibly. But they may have a laptop with them. So they can just plug it in when they're on the road. So it offers people in the field the opportunity to review some of the processes and procedures around safety that they may not have had before if they were on the road or were at temporary work site," she said." It duplicates everything, except obviously we can't link you to any organizations that we have on the Web site. But it's the same information."

Although the Web site has only been up and running for a couple of months, Orthner said the response of those accessing the on-line information has been very positive so far.

"We're finding that the comments have been very positive in that organizations are telling us that it's increased their ability to access this information very quickly."

The second component of Worksafe Saskatchewan is a partnership program aimed at forming a province-wide network of organizations involved in workplace injury prevention.

"We recognize that workplace safety is the joint responsibility of everyone in the workplace. So what we're doing now is putting together a partnership program so the other agencies and organizations who are doing similar things across the province can basically join us under one umbrella. That's the whole intent of this program, is having all of us working together toward the same end. And that's what we're developing now," Orthner said.

The third component will involve injury prevention promotion, with campaigns to specifically target high-risk industries, while the fourth and final component will involve education and training initiatives.