Public forum to tackle workplace injuries

The Yukon's medical health officer is hopeful a public forum set for tomorrow evening will see more injuries prevented throughout the territory.

The Yukon’s medical health officer is hopeful a public forum set for tomorrow evening will see more injuries prevented throughout the territory.

Dr. Brendan Hanley will be joined by Robert Conn, president and CEO of the SMARTRISK Foundation, at 7 p.m. Tuesday at the Yukon Beringia Interpretive Centre for the discussion about managing risks.

“Traumatic injuries kill Yukon males at three times the national average and females at 2 1/2 times the national average,“ Hanley told reporters at a news conference early this morning.

He pointed to pie charts which showed 22 per cent of Yukon deaths were caused by injury, compared to eight per cent across the country from 1996 to 1999.

A similar chart showed 10 per cent of female deaths were injury-prompted compared to four per cent across the country.

Conn, who left his career as a heart transplant surgeon to work in injury prevention, said prevention is about managing risk and accepting that everything has some risk in it.

The Toronto-based surgeon ended his practice after he began thinking about just how many transplants were being done because organ donations that came from deaths that could have been prevented.

He founded SMARTRISK, which is dedicated to foiling injuries and saving lives, and was recognized at Expo 2000 in Germany for creating one of the most innovative programs world-wide for sustaining human life.

In the No Regrets program the foundation delivers to schools, the organization works to provide a more positive message about safety to teenagers than the typical route of rules and “don’t” that are often peppered into discussions on safety.

“It’s all about seeing the risk and managing it,“ Conn said.

The reason an ATV driver dons a helmet, for example, is so he or she can get home at the end of the day and be able to go back out again.

Wearing a seatbelt in the back of a friend’s car is done to get to and from a party and be able to attend the next one, for example.

Teenagers have responded well to the message, Conn noted.

In the program, the foundation begins work with two students at each school involved. Each pair then involves a group of five students who are part of different social groups in the school to deliver the program.

Given the number of injuries to young people in the territory, Conn noted, there’s a huge opportunity to promote risk management.

While statistics on the number of workplace injuries compared to other injuries weren’t available to the media this morning, Hanley noted there’s an overlap in what causes both workplace and recreational injuries.

Conn wants to see a more analytical look into injuries. He pointed out that it’s only in the last year that Ontario has become the only province looking at the number of patients coming into hospital emergency rooms due to injuries.

“We don’t have really good data,“ he said.

If a 52-year-old man arrives at the hospital suffering from a heart attack, there is usually a long description about what happened.

In the case of the same 52-year-old man being in a traffic accident, though, it would be lucky to see a chart stating there had been an accident, he said.

While Conn couldn’t say why the Yukon has such high injury rates, he praised Hanley for showing leadership in pointing to the need to look at it.

Hanley, who succeeded Bryce Larke earlier this year, noted there are high injury rates in the North, both across the territories as well as northern parts of provinces.

Northern Ontario, for example, had 1 1/2 times the injury rate of the rest of the province.

Hanley noted part of the injury rate in the Yukon may be part of the risk-taking culture of the territory.

Yukoners tend to be fairly active and many enjoy going out on the land, he said. Whether a person goes out on an ATV for a weekend outing or to get to a trapline, the same safety principles should be incorporated, such as wearing a helmet, reporters were told.

Hanley noted the last thing he wants to do is discourage people from using ATVs or snow machines or doing other activities that come with some risk, but he wants people to be informed about the risks so they can manage them.

It’s often not that people ignore safety issues, but rather that they just don’t see what the risks are and therefore don’t know how to manage them, he said.

While there are laws in place, such as seat-belt legislation, which can be powerful tools to manage risks, at the end of the day it comes down to personal choice, Conn said.