David Wootten

This presentation will review the postive impacts of water rinising for chemical exposure injuries but also the limitations of passive water rinsing and why the efficacy of active washing principals outperforms water washing. The science is clear - amphoteric, hypertonic solutions will present immediate improved results for the individual exposed to aggresive chemical agents.

Shelly Meadows

Martin Franchi

Workplace stress is unavoidable - at least some of it is. Your people are the barometer for the health of your organizations environment; They are the canaries; Your workplace is the metaphorical coal mine. Are you listening to what your employees are saying (or not saying, but are showing) about workplace stress and how to best combat it? Or are you solely relying on their personal resilience to carry them through?

Stress mitigation and mental health is a hot topic with the ongoing impact of the global pandemic on the workplace. Traditional approaches using resilience as a go-to solution are no longer sufficient and many organizations fail address, or even understand, the root causes in the workplace. Workforce sustainability, safety and organizational effectiveness require health safety professionals to think differently in the new paradigm in a way that puts psychological health safety on a level playing field with physical health safety like never before.

Mary Myketyn Driscoll

In Nova Scotia we have a culture of substance use. Substance use harms impact most at some point in their lives. Stigma remains to be the biggest barrier for people with addiction getting the support they need. In response, the Central Zone Health Promotion team with Mental Health Addictions has developed the Substance Use Disorder Support Education (SUDSE) program. Over the past two years SUDSE has been delivered virtually to people from various organizations across Nova Scotia and New Brunswick. SUDSE has been helping people and teams come together to have conversations about substance use, substance use disorder, and addiction to create more supportive and inclusive workplaces. The daylong session is centred around adult learning and transformational conversations. SUDSE facilitates opens dialogue to engage participants in understanding what they and their organization can do to better support their staff and clients. This conference presentation session will include and a brief overview of the SUDSE program and philosophy before engaging attendees in a focused conversation exercise. The exercise will provide a similar learning experience as a SUDSE module. Attendees will be able to reflect on how substance use shows up in their workplace and will be introduced to different perspectives of what that means for their organizational health and wellness. Attendees will become familiar with some language that can help them begin conversations internally with their organization on the topic.

Dave Elniski

Psychological health and safety is becoming an increasing area of focus for safety professionals in Canada. Federal and provincial legislation has increasingly been amended to emphasize the role employers play in their employees mental health. Organizations now search for psychosocial hazards in their operations while safety professionals seek professional development in this area. This shift in safety calls on managers and supervisors at all levels to reflect on their management style and how it may contribute, positively or negatively, to a psychologically safe workplace. Deeper understandings of workplace culture are needed to address psychosocial hazards and, as a result, safety professionals and leaders need tools to help them. Enter equity and equality, two terms that are related to fairness but hint at vastly different approaches to leadership and safety management. Through the University of Lethbridge, Dave Elniskis interdisciplinary research into trucking safety systems sheds light on equity in safety while examining the role of individuals compared to the role of organizations, all with the purpose of better equipping safety professionals for the task of positively contributing to psychological safety. Dave will discuss why including psychological safety requirements in Canadian safety legislation is much more than just a new technical compliance requirement and how seeing equity and equality as a spectrum can help managers and safety professionals apply new concepts in their operations.

Janet Mannella

The Mental Health Commission of Canada reports (2022, https://mentalhealthcommission.ca/what-we-do/workplace/ ) about 30 per cent of short- and long-term disability claims in Canada are attributed to mental healthThe total cost from mental health problems to the Canadian economy exceeds $50 billion annually.

The workplace can affect peoples mental and physical health, both. Organizations play a pivotal role in prevention. Join the Canadian Centre for Occupational Health and Safety (CCOHS) and learn about workplace hazard and risk management and the fundamentals of a comprehensive workplace health and safety program. Learn how to apply hazard prevention through the Recognize, Assess, Control, and Evaluate (R.A.C.E) methodology in your workplace. Resources and tools will be outlined for application in a variety of workplaces. Attendees will be encouraged to ask questions and participate in session dialogue. This interactive session is intended for managers, supervisors, leadership, health and safety professionals, and health and safety committee members.

Todd Hickey

Human Factors Ergonomics is the scientific discipline concerned with the interactions between humans and other elements of a system to optimize human well-being and system performance. Put another way, it is the application of psychological and physiological principles to the engineering and design of products, processes, and systems. Regardless of how we describe it, we must remember that the human is at the center of it all. Join Todd for a conversation about musculoskeletal injury prevention, psychosocial risk factors, and how to keep yourself, and your people, safe healthy at work.

Perley Brewer

Lets be honest - health and safety training is boring! The only good part of health and safety training, is that it gets me off the job for the day and provides a good opportunity for some power-naps which is feedback from employees when told they must attend health safety training. How do you make topics like WHMIS, lockout and fall protection exciting? Can you present these topics in an entertaining, engaging, and informative way and leave your audience saying, surprisingly, I really enjoyed today and now I understand why topics like WHMIS or Fall Protection are so important! Many have told me this kind of outcome cannot be achieved. Well, I know it can! Participants have told tell me over-and-over that it is my stories that help them connect with the health and safety topic and help them understand the why behind why a particular topic was included in the legislation. Stories can come from a trainers personal experiences, the right video selected to drive home a certain theme or from recent health safety stories that have been covered in the media. I will share a number of stories to help you understand how you-too can use this technique to make your workshops more effective. I will conclude my workshop with the story and lessons I learned from a 2-hour dinner with the mother and father of a young worker who died on the job at a New Brunswick Walmart. A story that will break your heart!

Yannick Provencher

Jackie Kinley

Psychological safety is a topic that is gaining attention due to its inherent link with workers health and safety. Particularly, employees that feel psychologically safe at work are more likely to adhere to safety practices (e.g., incident reporting) compared to workers feeling psychologically unsafe. Psychological safety is defined as the shared belief that a team (group/organization) is comfortable with interpersonal risk-taking by allowing their employees to be themselves without fear of retribution and negative consequences to their self-image, status, or career (Kahn, 1990; Edmondson, 2014). It serves as a proactive measure against health and safety hazards. However, it can be challenging for organizations to create a psychologically safe environment for their workers. This session will cover how it can be done through the use of resilience and organizational fitness. Organizations promoting resilience among their employees are likely to create an environment of psychological safety, as well as provide them with the tools required to face adversities they might encounter on the job. Ultimately, it will promote their psychological health and engagement, which in turn will reduce their risk of physical and psychological injuries. On the other hand, organizational fitness focuses on the climate of an organization at three different levels: 1) Employees engagement and satisfaction at work, 2) the civility and citizenship among work teams, and 3) the effectiveness of the leadership. Tackling these three components is crucial, as it will directly impact whether employees feel safe to take interpersonal and be themselves at work, thus promoting psychological safety.

Erica Dehmel

Sleepy workers are a danger to themselves and those around them. To better understand how prominent the tired worker is, and how sleepiness can impact an organization, its important to understand sleep and how it relates to occupational health safety. In this presentation, we will review the function of sleep and how it relates to our physical and mental health; how certain occupational factors can impact sleep, including poor sleep hygiene, shift work, and sleep-disordered breathing (with a focus on obstructive sleep apnea - OSA); and the impact poor sleep has on occupational health and safety, employee productivity and the quality of life of the individual impacted by poor sleep. We will review the steps that employers and individuals can take to recognize, diagnose and manage underlying sleep disorders and the many benefits of better sleep.

MJ MacDonald

Suicide is a very real problem in the construction industry. According to the CDC, male construction worker suicide rate is over four times higher than the national suicide average, and construction and extraction is the #1 occupational group for deaths by suicide. Safety professionals in the construction industry need to start talking about mental health and have programs in place to support their workers. In this session, Construction Safety Nova Scotia will reveal the different resources it has available for construction employers, including toolbox talks, posters, specific suicide prevention communications, and training opportunities. It will also reveal a pilot project in the works that has seen success in other jurisdictions and is promising to significantly improve the mental health of construction workers. The session will also discuss CSA-Z1003 and how this can be a very valuable tool for employers who are ready to take this next step in psychological safety. The practices and approaches discussed will be focused on the construction industry but are applicable across sectors.

Thomas Tenkate

The COVID pandemic has changed the nature of work. We now have a new normal of working from home, with some saying that work from anywhere is the future of work. During 2022, we conducted a study into the experiences of supervisors of remote/at-home workers to examine what adaptations in practice were needed to ensure that the IRS philosophy, and hence OHS legislation, was applied effectively to ensure worker health and safety while working at home/remotely. We conducted in-depth interviews and focus groups with supervisors and based on these findings we developed a training workshop to support supervisors. The key findings of the study were that supervisors: (1) were not able to carry out a significant number of their standard OHS supervisory functions as many of these functions are based on employees being in a fixed/workplace controlled location; (2) did try to meet OHS needs of workers through virtual approaches including the provision of resources, virtual communication and training, and virtual onboarding of new workers; (3) were mainly addressing non-traditional OHS issues, with a specific focus on the physiological health of their remote workers; (4) had to shift their role from being a supervisor to that of a leader, and did so through enhanced communication with staff; and (5) found that managing at-home/remote workers to be extremely stressful. This presentation will discuss the outcomes of this study and the strategies and approaches supervisors can take to keep their remote workers and themselves healthy and safe, and fulfill their OHS obligations.

Iyad Mansour

The Opioid Crisis in Canada has taken a toll over the last decade and shows no signs of slowing down. The alarming numbers reported on accidental drug overdose and poisonings has prompted Health Canada to partner up with select training and response organizations including St. John Ambulance. This partnership allows us to create and deliver innovative programs to reach underserved communities with life saving training and antidotes. In this session Iyad Mansour will highlight the steps taken to date on delivering Opioid Response training with community organizations from Coast to Coast. We will also discuss legislative changes to workplace health and safety regulations in some jurisdictions to respond to this crisis.

Paul Moores

Natasha Clarke

Luis Mantilla

Emily Kaulback

Chaweewan Saenkghunnatham

Adelaide Amuah

In this session, conference attendees will learn about the NSCC Occupational Health and Safety two-year diploma program and why students are the future of the industry. We will focus on what safety culture looks like in countries other than Canada and how the increase of immigrants has affected Nova Scotia workplaces. Paul Moores (one of the OHS students) will be speaking about his story of a workplace incident that has strongly impacted his life. We will conclude by talking about student work terms and how hiring students for a work term benefits the student and the employer.

David Wootten

This presentation will review the postive impacts of water rinising for chemical exposure injuries but also the limitations of passive water rinsing and why the efficacy of active washing principals outperforms water washing. The science is clear - amphoteric, hypertonic solutions will present immediate improved results for the individual exposed to aggresive chemical agents.

David Powers

Joint health and safety committees can greatly enhance an organizations OHS efforts. Yet, many committees seem to be on life support with apathetic members, shallow discussions and many missed meetings. This session presents a series of tried and true ideas on how to energize your safety committee by making it interesting for your members. Interested members make an effective committee which in turn, benefits the organization. Join David as he shares his recipes for making your safety committee the gourmet meal it can be!

Shelly Meadows

Martin Franchi

Workplace stress is unavoidable - at least some of it is. Your people are the barometer for the health of your organizations environment; They are the canaries; Your workplace is the metaphorical coal mine. Are you listening to what your employees are saying (or not saying, but are showing) about workplace stress and how to best combat it? Or are you solely relying on their personal resilience to carry them through?

Stress mitigation and mental health is a hot topic with the ongoing impact of the global pandemic on the workplace. Traditional approaches using resilience as a go-to solution are no longer sufficient and many organizations fail address, or even understand, the root causes in the workplace. Workforce sustainability, safety and organizational effectiveness require health safety professionals to think differently in the new paradigm in a way that puts psychological health safety on a level playing field with physical health safety like never before.

Joe Treen

Employee orientation, in particular with regards to Safety, often consists of a large volume of complicated and technical information delivered in a very limited period of time. The question is, how much information is actually retained? Drinking from a Fire Hose will discuss challenges faced and potential outcomes if attention is not paid to how orientations are delivered to new employees.

Janet Mannella

The Mental Health Commission of Canada reports (2022, https://mentalhealthcommission.ca/what-we-do/workplace/ ) about 30 per cent of short- and long-term disability claims in Canada are attributed to mental healthThe total cost from mental health problems to the Canadian economy exceeds $50 billion annually.

The workplace can affect peoples mental and physical health, both. Organizations play a pivotal role in prevention. Join the Canadian Centre for Occupational Health and Safety (CCOHS) and learn about workplace hazard and risk management and the fundamentals of a comprehensive workplace health and safety program. Learn how to apply hazard prevention through the Recognize, Assess, Control, and Evaluate (R.A.C.E) methodology in your workplace. Resources and tools will be outlined for application in a variety of workplaces. Attendees will be encouraged to ask questions and participate in session dialogue. This interactive session is intended for managers, supervisors, leadership, health and safety professionals, and health and safety committee members.

Todd Hickey

Human Factors Ergonomics is the scientific discipline concerned with the interactions between humans and other elements of a system to optimize human well-being and system performance. Put another way, it is the application of psychological and physiological principles to the engineering and design of products, processes, and systems. Regardless of how we describe it, we must remember that the human is at the center of it all. Join Todd for a conversation about musculoskeletal injury prevention, psychosocial risk factors, and how to keep yourself, and your people, safe healthy at work.

Perley Brewer

Lets be honest - health and safety training is boring! The only good part of health and safety training, is that it gets me off the job for the day and provides a good opportunity for some power-naps which is feedback from employees when told they must attend health safety training. How do you make topics like WHMIS, lockout and fall protection exciting? Can you present these topics in an entertaining, engaging, and informative way and leave your audience saying, surprisingly, I really enjoyed today and now I understand why topics like WHMIS or Fall Protection are so important! Many have told me this kind of outcome cannot be achieved. Well, I know it can! Participants have told tell me over-and-over that it is my stories that help them connect with the health and safety topic and help them understand the why behind why a particular topic was included in the legislation. Stories can come from a trainers personal experiences, the right video selected to drive home a certain theme or from recent health safety stories that have been covered in the media. I will share a number of stories to help you understand how you-too can use this technique to make your workshops more effective. I will conclude my workshop with the story and lessons I learned from a 2-hour dinner with the mother and father of a young worker who died on the job at a New Brunswick Walmart. A story that will break your heart!

Yvonne O’Reilly

Your joint occupational health and safety committee (JOHSC) forms an integral part of your internal responsibility system (IRS). Has your committee moved past just conducting housekeeping inspections to effectively evaluate the employers written program? Does the committee go beyond reviewing statistics to evaluate the implementation of the OHS management system? Are you guided by a Committee Manifesto?

Mike Carter

Louise Trotter

Lindsay Fenton

If we dont truly understand the status of our safety program (compliance, application, etc.) then we will never be able to improve safety. Subsequent to the completion of safety climate assessments to evaluate the effectiveness of various safety programs, general knowledge, and staff behaviours. Opportunities were identified in four key areas: Leadership, Participation, Prevention and Incident Management. This led to the first iteration of our Safety Profile Scorecard (SPS). The SPS is a dashboard that provides information at any given moment regarding the status of safety at a particular location / department / region. The results of this system have been monitored and assessed against staff retention, union grievances, claim costs, and general engagement. Where sites achieve or exceed the minimum score monthly, the impact to the overall site culture is vastly improved. At Shannex, we think we are on to something pretty special as almost instantaneously we can review the safety metrics at any one of our locations, or trend regions etc. It did take some time to get here but we want to share both the approach and the result, hoping to inspire others to apply a similar model.

Lorna Catrambone

Cathy McNeil

Its just an injury, right? Every year in Canada, thousands of workers are injured seriously enough to need time away from their jobs. But they heal better or worse. They go back to work or not. The long-term consequences an injury can have on an individual and a family are often invisible to everyone else. Cathy McNeils dad was a coal miner when an explosion occurred underground. Ten men were killed immediately and two more died not long after. Four including Cathys dad survived with severe burns. Cathy was just 12 years old. Her fathers injuries affected every aspect of the familys life and continue to cast a shadow more than 40 years later. In this moving presentation youll learn the impacts of a workplace injury, long after the incident has faded from the news. Youll also learn about how Threads of Life supports individuals and families after an injury, fatality or occupational disease, and the difference that support has made for Cathy and her father.

Iyad Mansour

The Opioid Crisis in Canada has taken a toll over the last decade and shows no signs of slowing down. The alarming numbers reported on accidental drug overdose and poisonings has prompted Health Canada to partner up with select training and response organizations including St. John Ambulance. This partnership allows us to create and deliver innovative programs to reach underserved communities with life saving training and antidotes. In this session Iyad Mansour will highlight the steps taken to date on delivering Opioid Response training with community organizations from Coast to Coast. We will also discuss legislative changes to workplace health and safety regulations in some jurisdictions to respond to this crisis.

Darrel Nickerson

One of the goals we have in safety is to reduce the risk of hazards that can lead to injuries in our workplaces. By completing more effective investigations into the actual and near miss events that occur we can help reduce the risk of future events. Thissession will discuss Risk Management in the context of the Safety Management System and will review how better investigations will improve risk reduction. The investigation process will be reviewed from Evidence Collection to Root Cause and a focus on the importance of Controls or Corrective Actions. Some helpful worksheets will be made available to help those involved in safety improve their investigation skills while reducing risk in their workplaces.

David Wootten

This presentation will review the postive impacts of water rinising for chemical exposure injuries but also the limitations of passive water rinsing and why the efficacy of active washing principals outperforms water washing. The science is clear - amphoteric, hypertonic solutions will present immediate improved results for the individual exposed to aggresive chemical agents.

David Powers

Joint health and safety committees can greatly enhance an organizations OHS efforts. Yet, many committees seem to be on life support with apathetic members, shallow discussions and many missed meetings. This session presents a series of tried and true ideas on how to energize your safety committee by making it interesting for your members. Interested members make an effective committee which in turn, benefits the organization. Join David as he shares his recipes for making your safety committee the gourmet meal it can be!

Shelly Meadows

Martin Franchi

Workplace stress is unavoidable - at least some of it is. Your people are the barometer for the health of your organizations environment; They are the canaries; Your workplace is the metaphorical coal mine. Are you listening to what your employees are saying (or not saying, but are showing) about workplace stress and how to best combat it? Or are you solely relying on their personal resilience to carry them through?

Stress mitigation and mental health is a hot topic with the ongoing impact of the global pandemic on the workplace. Traditional approaches using resilience as a go-to solution are no longer sufficient and many organizations fail address, or even understand, the root causes in the workplace. Workforce sustainability, safety and organizational effectiveness require health safety professionals to think differently in the new paradigm in a way that puts psychological health safety on a level playing field with physical health safety like never before.

Joe Treen

Employee orientation, in particular with regards to Safety, often consists of a large volume of complicated and technical information delivered in a very limited period of time. The question is, how much information is actually retained? Drinking from a Fire Hose will discuss challenges faced and potential outcomes if attention is not paid to how orientations are delivered to new employees.

Dave Elniski

Psychological health and safety is becoming an increasing area of focus for safety professionals in Canada. Federal and provincial legislation has increasingly been amended to emphasize the role employers play in their employees mental health. Organizations now search for psychosocial hazards in their operations while safety professionals seek professional development in this area. This shift in safety calls on managers and supervisors at all levels to reflect on their management style and how it may contribute, positively or negatively, to a psychologically safe workplace. Deeper understandings of workplace culture are needed to address psychosocial hazards and, as a result, safety professionals and leaders need tools to help them. Enter equity and equality, two terms that are related to fairness but hint at vastly different approaches to leadership and safety management. Through the University of Lethbridge, Dave Elniskis interdisciplinary research into trucking safety systems sheds light on equity in safety while examining the role of individuals compared to the role of organizations, all with the purpose of better equipping safety professionals for the task of positively contributing to psychological safety. Dave will discuss why including psychological safety requirements in Canadian safety legislation is much more than just a new technical compliance requirement and how seeing equity and equality as a spectrum can help managers and safety professionals apply new concepts in their operations.

Robin Angel

Kelly MacRitchie

BCRSP, CRBOH and other credentialing organisations have established codes of ethics that govern the professional conduct of their certificants, yet ethical practice is important for all OHS professionals regardless of certification status. Topics such as scope of practice, bias, competing duties, and ethical blind spots will be explored including illustrative examples. Attendees will also be asked to participate in discussion on ethical topics. This session will explore: why professional ethics are important, ethical challenges that OHS professionals may face in the workplace, and how OHS professionals may utilize an ethical decision-making framework.

Sunny Jhaj

Your employees may not be qualified to drive company vehicles. The current minimum standards approach to a driver licensing misses many basic real-world skills that your drivers need to safely operate fleet vehicles. Road test standards are actuarially driven; what costs the most is seen as most critical. Preventing crashes that result in fatalities or devastating injuries is foremost (as it should be). Slow speed manoeuvring and close quarters driving skills, however, are not seen as particularly important in testing or licensing but backing damage and other minor dents and scratches are disproportionately represented in fleet crash statistics. Listen to a former road test examiner as he explains what happens on a government road test. You may be surprised by what isn’t there!

Janet Mannella

The Mental Health Commission of Canada reports (2022, https://mentalhealthcommission.ca/what-we-do/workplace/ ) about 30 per cent of short- and long-term disability claims in Canada are attributed to mental healthThe total cost from mental health problems to the Canadian economy exceeds $50 billion annually.

The workplace can affect peoples mental and physical health, both. Organizations play a pivotal role in prevention. Join the Canadian Centre for Occupational Health and Safety (CCOHS) and learn about workplace hazard and risk management and the fundamentals of a comprehensive workplace health and safety program. Learn how to apply hazard prevention through the Recognize, Assess, Control, and Evaluate (R.A.C.E) methodology in your workplace. Resources and tools will be outlined for application in a variety of workplaces. Attendees will be encouraged to ask questions and participate in session dialogue. This interactive session is intended for managers, supervisors, leadership, health and safety professionals, and health and safety committee members.

Philippe Gagnon

Discussion about the danger of changes, how to risk assess them, how to manage change and how to create a system that will allow corporations the make change safely through Management of Change (MOC) process.

Perley Brewer

Lets be honest - health and safety training is boring! The only good part of health and safety training, is that it gets me off the job for the day and provides a good opportunity for some power-naps which is feedback from employees when told they must attend health safety training. How do you make topics like WHMIS, lockout and fall protection exciting? Can you present these topics in an entertaining, engaging, and informative way and leave your audience saying, surprisingly, I really enjoyed today and now I understand why topics like WHMIS or Fall Protection are so important! Many have told me this kind of outcome cannot be achieved. Well, I know it can! Participants have told tell me over-and-over that it is my stories that help them connect with the health and safety topic and help them understand the why behind why a particular topic was included in the legislation. Stories can come from a trainers personal experiences, the right video selected to drive home a certain theme or from recent health safety stories that have been covered in the media. I will share a number of stories to help you understand how you-too can use this technique to make your workshops more effective. I will conclude my workshop with the story and lessons I learned from a 2-hour dinner with the mother and father of a young worker who died on the job at a New Brunswick Walmart. A story that will break your heart!

Todd Leader

I was going about my business, following my newly-published book around the country, speaking and training on leadership and on addiction and mental health system reform. I was also in my 27th year as a well-respected, multiple-award-winning faculty member in a university psychology department. Then suddenly people started complaining about things I was saying and how I was communicating inappropriately, especially with women. Complaints came from students, former students, participants at conferences, and professional colleagues, and some were filed formally with professional regulatory bodies and employers. I was terrified and uncomfortable, after spending my life trying to help people, not harm them. But I didnt understand. It made no sense to me until after a suicide attempt, diagnosis, and cure. Then I saw what others had been seeing. This presentation is based on my personal story of a medication-induced mental illness that I had the fortune of surviving (unlike many). I also had the unique benefit of a professional background that enabled me to analyze and learn things from the experience that can help individuals and employers. From that analysis, I’ll define stigma in a more real way than youve heard before, and challenge what the lets talk era has misled us to believe. Using the professional and workplace complaint processes I went through (both well and poorly handled), and my decades of management experience, I’ll provide insights and tips that can help you become more skilled at preventing, identifying, and managing stigma in workplace culture, policy, and practice.

Mike Carter

Louise Trotter

Lindsay Fenton

If we dont truly understand the status of our safety program (compliance, application, etc.) then we will never be able to improve safety. Subsequent to the completion of safety climate assessments to evaluate the effectiveness of various safety programs, general knowledge, and staff behaviours. Opportunities were identified in four key areas: Leadership, Participation, Prevention and Incident Management. This led to the first iteration of our Safety Profile Scorecard (SPS). The SPS is a dashboard that provides information at any given moment regarding the status of safety at a particular location / department / region. The results of this system have been monitored and assessed against staff retention, union grievances, claim costs, and general engagement. Where sites achieve or exceed the minimum score monthly, the impact to the overall site culture is vastly improved. At Shannex, we think we are on to something pretty special as almost instantaneously we can review the safety metrics at any one of our locations, or trend regions etc. It did take some time to get here but we want to share both the approach and the result, hoping to inspire others to apply a similar model.

Thomas Tenkate

The COVID pandemic has changed the nature of work. We now have a new normal of working from home, with some saying that work from anywhere is the future of work. During 2022, we conducted a study into the experiences of supervisors of remote/at-home workers to examine what adaptations in practice were needed to ensure that the IRS philosophy, and hence OHS legislation, was applied effectively to ensure worker health and safety while working at home/remotely. We conducted in-depth interviews and focus groups with supervisors and based on these findings we developed a training workshop to support supervisors. The key findings of the study were that supervisors: (1) were not able to carry out a significant number of their standard OHS supervisory functions as many of these functions are based on employees being in a fixed/workplace controlled location; (2) did try to meet OHS needs of workers through virtual approaches including the provision of resources, virtual communication and training, and virtual onboarding of new workers; (3) were mainly addressing non-traditional OHS issues, with a specific focus on the physiological health of their remote workers; (4) had to shift their role from being a supervisor to that of a leader, and did so through enhanced communication with staff; and (5) found that managing at-home/remote workers to be extremely stressful. This presentation will discuss the outcomes of this study and the strategies and approaches supervisors can take to keep their remote workers and themselves healthy and safe, and fulfill their OHS obligations.

Lorna Catrambone

Cathy McNeil

Its just an injury, right? Every year in Canada, thousands of workers are injured seriously enough to need time away from their jobs. But they heal better or worse. They go back to work or not. The long-term consequences an injury can have on an individual and a family are often invisible to everyone else. Cathy McNeils dad was a coal miner when an explosion occurred underground. Ten men were killed immediately and two more died not long after. Four including Cathys dad survived with severe burns. Cathy was just 12 years old. Her fathers injuries affected every aspect of the familys life and continue to cast a shadow more than 40 years later. In this moving presentation youll learn the impacts of a workplace injury, long after the incident has faded from the news. Youll also learn about how Threads of Life supports individuals and families after an injury, fatality or occupational disease, and the difference that support has made for Cathy and her father.

Iyad Mansour

The Opioid Crisis in Canada has taken a toll over the last decade and shows no signs of slowing down. The alarming numbers reported on accidental drug overdose and poisonings has prompted Health Canada to partner up with select training and response organizations including St. John Ambulance. This partnership allows us to create and deliver innovative programs to reach underserved communities with life saving training and antidotes. In this session Iyad Mansour will highlight the steps taken to date on delivering Opioid Response training with community organizations from Coast to Coast. We will also discuss legislative changes to workplace health and safety regulations in some jurisdictions to respond to this crisis.

Thomas Tenkate

The safety training that many workers receive is increasingly pro forma, formulaic, generic, and now, very often, delivered online. It often does not meet the need to ensure workers are fully informed of the hazards and risks they are exposed to as part of their job. This situation is particularly common for WHMIS training where workers often complete an online generic training module and there is little job/task specific training on the hazards associated with the chemicals they are specifically using. The use of hazard/risk banding approaches (i.e., simple hazard and risk assessment approaches) can be one way of engaging workers in chemical safety management and helping them to better understand the hazards associated with the chemicals they are using in their jobs/tasks. This presentation will discuss the use of hazard and risk banding approaches, including publicly available free software, and how this can be incorporated into WHMIS training. Such an approach engages workers in more fully understanding the content of safety data sheets, gives workers an easy-to-understand rating of how hazardous each chemical is that they are using, helps workplaces prioritize the most hazardous chemicals for enhanced control measures, and allows safe-work procedures to be focused on the highest risk chemicals (based on use).

Darrel Nickerson

One of the goals we have in safety is to reduce the risk of hazards that can lead to injuries in our workplaces. By completing more effective investigations into the actual and near miss events that occur we can help reduce the risk of future events. Thissession will discuss Risk Management in the context of the Safety Management System and will review how better investigations will improve risk reduction. The investigation process will be reviewed from Evidence Collection to Root Cause and a focus on the importance of Controls or Corrective Actions. Some helpful worksheets will be made available to help those involved in safety improve their investigation skills while reducing risk in their workplaces.

David Wootten

This presentation will review the postive impacts of water rinising for chemical exposure injuries but also the limitations of passive water rinsing and why the efficacy of active washing principals outperforms water washing. The science is clear - amphoteric, hypertonic solutions will present immediate improved results for the individual exposed to aggresive chemical agents.

Perley Brewer

Lets be honest - health and safety training is boring! The only good part of health and safety training, is that it gets me off the job for the day and provides a good opportunity for some power-naps which is feedback from employees when told they must attend health safety training. How do you make topics like WHMIS, lockout and fall protection exciting? Can you present these topics in an entertaining, engaging, and informative way and leave your audience saying, surprisingly, I really enjoyed today and now I understand why topics like WHMIS or Fall Protection are so important! Many have told me this kind of outcome cannot be achieved. Well, I know it can! Participants have told tell me over-and-over that it is my stories that help them connect with the health and safety topic and help them understand the why behind why a particular topic was included in the legislation. Stories can come from a trainers personal experiences, the right video selected to drive home a certain theme or from recent health safety stories that have been covered in the media. I will share a number of stories to help you understand how you-too can use this technique to make your workshops more effective. I will conclude my workshop with the story and lessons I learned from a 2-hour dinner with the mother and father of a young worker who died on the job at a New Brunswick Walmart. A story that will break your heart!

Ray Grant

Mitch MacGregor

Jennifer Schnare

Jason Dauphinee‑Muise

David Pottle

The Nova Scotia Department of Labour, Skills & Immigration, Safety Branch, Occupational Health & Safety and Technical Safety Divisions will provide updates on several upcoming initiatives through individual presentations from members of the team. Presentations will be brought to you from, Technical Safety, Enforcement & Compliance, Technical Services and Awareness & Outreach.

Topics of the presentation will include:

• Hydrogen Blending into Existing HRM Natural Gas Supply and Certification of Appliances (Dave Pottle)

• Digital Inspection Booking System for Elevators (Ray Grant)

• The introduction of Nova SAFE a Nova Scotia Safety App for Occupational Health & Safety and Technical Safety relevant for all industries and sectors (Jennifer Schnare).

• Enforcement & Compliance – 2023 planned initiatives (Mitch MacGregor & Jason Dauphinee-Muise)

Jill Pulsifer

Safe and healthy work is often an integral part of recovering from a workplace injury. Organizations that effectively plan for the Return-to-Work process are better equipped to assist injured workers in their safe return to productive employment. In this session, we will discuss the importance of preparedness before an injury ever takes place. Using examples of common delays in the process to guide the discussion, we will explore viable solutions to improve your organization’s approach to Return-to-Work.

Iyad Mansour

The Opioid Crisis in Canada has taken a toll over the last decade and shows no signs of slowing down. The alarming numbers reported on accidental drug overdose and poisonings has prompted Health Canada to partner up with select training and response organizations including St. John Ambulance. This partnership allows us to create and deliver innovative programs to reach underserved communities with life saving training and antidotes. In this session Iyad Mansour will highlight the steps taken to date on delivering Opioid Response training with community organizations from Coast to Coast. We will also discuss legislative changes to workplace health and safety regulations in some jurisdictions to respond to this crisis.