Health-care workers are most often injured on the job in Saskatchewan

Health-care workers in Saskatchewan were the occupation most often injured in Saskatchewan in 2022, according to the 2022 report of Saskatchewan’s Workers’ Compensation Board (WCB), published Tuesday.

The injury rate in 2022 went down to 4.33 per 100 workers compared with 4.56 in the year prior. The total number of injury claims went up compared to 2021, but due to the Saskatchewan workforce growth, the percentage of injured workers still went down.

The riskiest jobs are in food processing and any job working with heavy machinery, like construction, oil drilling and farming. Close to 10 per cent of workers in those jobs had an injury last year.

Most injury reports came from health-care workers, especially nurses and nurse aides. There were 1,904 injury reports from registered nurses, nurse aides, orderlies and patient service associates, ahead of the 709 truckers that suffered injuries in 2022.

The CEO of the WCB, Phil Germain, attributed the large number of reports to the unique challenges health-care workers face.

“Health-care workers deal with many complex issues. We see a lot of soft tissue injuries, like shoulders and back, because of nurses trying to move patients. We also see a lot of COVID-19 claims. In addition to that, they also had some of the higher violence and psychological claims.”

The WCB recorded a loss of $115 million in 2022. The loss was attributed to investments that were made and the rising inflation. This loss was easily absorbed by the WCB reserve funds and the investments are already paying off, bringing the current funding percentage to 114.8 per cent.

“One hundred fifteen million dollars is a lot of money, but you need to look at this in context. We are a big organization and if we compare to our industry benchmark, an 8.8 per cent loss was predicted and we managed to keep it to a 5.5 per cent loss,” Germain said.

The big focus for the future is on preventing disability. The WCB noticed that disability often does not get noticed or gets noticed too late. The organization wants to work on identifying and helping those facing these issues.

“We have done a good job at managing disability, but we want to try and prevent disability from happening. If a roofer falls off a roof and breaks his arm, he might not be able to get to work after the arm heals. He could have developed a fear of heights which prevents him from doing his job. A police officer or firefighter might suffer from PTSD. These psychological issues can also lead to disability. We want to make sure we find a way to prevent these things in the future,” Germain said.