Excerpt from the Ontario Government’s ‘Newsroom’
The Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH), in Toronto, was fined $70,000 today for violations of the Occupational Health and Safety Act (OHSA) after workers were assaulted.
Blog Post #98 – Health & Safety Outside Canada
I have had the honour of suggesting changes in the Ontario, as well as the rest of Canada, health and safety legislation. The previous 99 blogs deal with Canadian content, specifically those in Ontario.
I thought it appropriate to complete the 100th blog with a recent example of an accident in the Galveston , Texas area. It just goes to show that health and safety is a 24/7 responsibility and occupational accidents have no borders.
I do not know the legislation and what laws are broken and it is my hope that someone from the great state of Texas will fill our readers in. Is it covered under Federal or State law? If I receive any follow-up on this particular incident I will forward it to the readers.
Thank you all for the dedicated readership during the first 100 blogs. The comments number over 6,900 as of today’s date, June 26, 2011 and it is my sincere wish to continue to provide quality blogs on health and safety for a long time to come.
Daniel L. Beal
Senior Trainer for HRS Group Inc.
Vice President
Blog Post #91 – Unfunded Liability Takes A Big Jump
Excerpt from the OH&S Canada Magazine
Legislated changes to employee benefits, along with poor investment returns, have caused the unfunded liability of Ontario’s Workplace Safety and Insurance Board (WSIB) to skyrocket more than $2 billion.
The WSIB’s annual report for 2007, released just in October, shows the liability grew from $5.997 billion in 2006 to $8.094 billion in 2007.
Bill 187, affecting the benefits for 155,000 workers, saw payments increase by 2.5 per cent; Bill 221, which ensures firefighters are compensated for work-related cancers and heart attacks, was made retroactive to 1960. Together, the moves increase benefits by $750 million.
Blog Post #87 – Little Positive about Being Overloaded – Stress
By Emily Landau — (Emily is the editorial assistant at the OHS Canada magazine)
Work role overload is creating stress among a growing number of health care professionals, notes a report released in January.
Defining role overload as “having too many responsibilities and too little time in which to attend to them,” the review cites some of the contributing factors as understaffing, competing priorities (both at work and at home) and the organizational culture of the health care system. The last necessitates urgency, thereby making it difficult for health care providers to say “no” to any given task.