Workplace and workforce health information systems in healthcare: Acknowledging the role of university researchers and highlighting the importance of health and safety committee capacity-building (Letter to Editor)

In the November/December 2008 issue of the CJPH, Gilligan and Alamgir1 provided an overview of the Workplace Health Information Tracking and Evaluation (WHITETM) database, produced through a partnership between the Occupational Health and Safety Agency for Healthcare (OHSAH), BC healthcare and BC healthcare unions on one hand, and a university-based research program funded through the Canadian Institutes of Health Research’s Community Alliances for Health Research (CAHR), Making Healthcare a Healthier Place to Work: A Partnership of Partnerships, on the other. This database and other products of this research collaboration, ranging from on-line learning products to new guidelines to decrease infectious disease transmission, indeed provide excellent examples of university-based researchers partnering with decisionmakers to “bridge the knowledge gap”.2,3 Nevertheless, the lack of clarity in the Gilligan-Alamgir article1 both about the role of unions as well as about the important role of university-based researchers in this partnership is lamentable. After all, health and safety associations exist in the healthcare sector across Canada as well as in other sectors in BC. What made OHSAH special was not only its strong bipartite governance but precisely the innovative decision to select a university-based researcher as its Founding Executive Director, someone who had long advocated worker involvement,4 use of web technology5 and establishment of data systems to guide interventions,6,7 heralding a groundbreaking partnership. The authors1 noted the limited attention that has thus far been devoted in WHITETM to collecting information about workplace conditions needed to guide actions by joint health and safety committees, an important feature of the original ethos of OHSAH.8 The concept for a comprehensive database on occupational health for healthcare, as previously developed by CAHR team members in Winnipeg, as well as our experience in the early days of the CAHR in BC to monitor and evaluate overhead lifts9 and the Prevention and Early Active Return-to-Work Safety program10,11 made it clear that prevention requires more than tracking injuries – it requires information to guide actions to improve workplace conditions. Learning from the experience in Manitoba, and in developing WHITETM in partnership with OHSAH, our research team has since developed another instrument, the Occupational Health And Safety Information System (OHASIS), working closely with research colleagues in Free State, South Africa as well as management, government and labour. OHASIS is currently being piloted at Pelonomi Hospital12 with a focus not on claims management, but rather on collecting data to improve conditions in the workplace, with a well-developed module for workplace inspections. Most importantly, we emphasize training health and safety committees to conduct incident investigations and workplace assessments and to use OHASIS for primary prevention. In highlighting the importance of workplace health surveillance, it is especially important that the need for independent research, front-line worker capacity-building and the focus on prevention7,12 do not take a backseat to use by employers for absenteeism control or claims management. Time will tell if investments in such databases really make healthcare a healthier place to work – but having such databases will certainly make that determination by independent university researchers easier to accomplish.