Preventing injury, illness and disability at work

This discussion paper is intended to start a dialogue about prevention among those who are interested in making workplaces safer and healthier. The following four key themes are presented to build a framework for further discussion and activity: theme 1 -- with multiple causes for workplace injury, illness, and disability, preventing these problems requires multiple solutions, operating in synergy; theme 2 -- efforts to reduce workplace injury, illness, and disability must build on both primary and secondary prevention approaches, merging these to create a more effective strategy; theme 3 -- before which strategies work and which do not can be agreed upon, a shared understanding is needed of how the effectiveness of occupational health interventions should be evaluated; and theme 4 -- building relationships between those who do research and those who use research knowledge is important if relevant research is to be produced that is readily taken up and applied to improve occupational health and safety.