While the number of on-the-job injuries in Saskatchewan is currently at an all-time low, the amount of injuries occurring in the province after working hours has never been higher.
Out of 500,000 working people in Saskatchewan, around 100,000 ,or 20 per cent, will have to take time off due to an injury that occurred after hours, the highest rate of injury in the country.
“We simply accept injuries as a part of everyday life in the province,” said Safe Saskatchewan CEO Gord Moker. “We call them accidents, and really, an accident is an act of fate and there is nothing we can do about it. Injuries are preventable.”
Injuries outside of the workplace come at a great cost to employers. The average cost for a workplace injury in the province is $12,000, but non-workplace injuries have shown to come in at a much higher cost.
“Off-the-job injuries are eight times more costly then on-the-job injuries,” Moker said. “One of the reasons we think this is is that we don’t have the infrastructure in place when a person is injured after work then in the workplace. Really there has been little investment towards health and safety after 5 pm in our province.”
Moker says people take workplace safety seriously in Saskatchewan but we tend to accept injuries as an inevitable part of everyday life.
“It really traces back to our agricultural roots,” said Moker. “Most of us either grew up on a farm or grew up in rural Saskatchewan, and we have this whole ‘get ‘er done’ philosophy, and we’ve done it at all costs. People will go to work and wear all their protective gear and follow all the procedures. But then they will go home, take off their steel toed boots, put on shorts and sandals and then cut the lawn. It just doesn’t make sense.”
A study done by Safe Saskatchewan looked at injuries incurred by employees of Mosaic Potash in 2006. Between 2,500 employees, 100 days were lost to injuries in the workplace, while 6,100 days were lost due to non-workplace injuries.
Moker says that the cost of non-workplace injury for Mosaic was staggering, both in time and money. 6,100 days of lost productivity is equivalent to 30 years.
“A conservative estimate is that Mosaic lost $1.5 million in direct costs, and $6.8 million in indirect costs for a total of $7.5 million,” Moker said. To put it another way, Mosaic would have to increase sales by 100 million to offset the cost of injury.”
Moker says that business leaders are often shocked when he shows them the Mosaic case study. Still, he says many industry leaders aren’t making enough effort to educate their employees about injuries outside of the workplace.
“Their mouths drop, but my frustration is that nobody is doing anything about it,” said Moker.
One company making strides towards educating employees about safety in their community is SaskEnergy.
“It’s a challenge, since people can do whatever they want on their own time,” said Robby Taylor, manager of health and safety at SaskEnergy. “So it’s a bit of challenge for us to figure out the appropriate way to approach that. But we’ve been doing different types of communication and messaging to encourage people to continue being safe when they get home and have it be a 24-hour thing instead of just at work.”
SaskEnergy has a safety week each year, and has other small initiatives including educating employees about slips and falls at home as well as providing safety eyewear for employees to use outside the workplace.
However, Taylor says that educating 1,100 employees province-wide about safety outside the workplace is a challenge.
“Our workforce is so diverse- we have office workers, construction employees and gas transmission employees,” Taylor said. “The safety standards are completely different depending on what you do as your job and safety can mean something completely different. It all boils down to a key core message, but in practical terms safety means something completely different for a construction worker then it does for a customer service rep.”
It would seem that SaskEnergy’s safety message is resonating with employees. 2013 was the company’s best year on record for safety, seeing a decrease in lost time injuries, vehicle collisions, and injuries where employees had to seek medical attention.
“We are starting to see an improvement in our safety record, but we still realize that we have a ways to go,” Taylor said. “It’s a balancing act, we need to celebrate our success, but still have a sober perspective of where it is that we are at.”
Moker says that even though injury rates are still high, the province is starting to see the importance of investing in safety.
“The investments in health and safety have never been greater in our province,” Moker said. ”And we are starting to see small pockets of leaders that are starting to investigate investing in opportunities for injury prevention outside the workplace.”
