How safe are Ontario’s workplaces and are they getting safer?
2023 score
It’s a simple, single measure. Our health and safety index combines multiple performance indicators of health and safety into a single, evidence-based measure. This measure, or score, raises awareness and helps system partners focus their health and safety efforts and resources.
2023 Top five industry scores
Manufacturing
Strength: Workplace culture and prevention
Focus on: Reducing injuries and improving compliance with OHSA and regulations
While prevention activities and leadership both improved, an increase in mental stress and serious injuries and fatalities resulted in a negative score.
Healthcare
Strength: Workplace culture and prevention
Focus on: Reducing injuries and improving compliance with OHSA and regulations
The largest negative driver in health care was increased injuries, mainly those related to serious injuries and traumatic fatalities. The increase in physical injuries and illnesses was predominantly related to COVID-19. Poor outcomes in compliance also led to an overall negative score.
Construction
Strength: Lower injuries
Focus on: Improving compliance with OHSA and regulations
Improvements in return-to-work support and reduction in physical and mental injuries resulted in a positive score in construction.
Retail trade
Strength: Lower injuries and workplace culture
Focus on: Improving compliance with OHSA and regulations
Despite a lower score in compliance due to more severe orders, the positive result was largely driven by lower physical injuries and serious injuries and fatalities.
Transportation
Strength: Prevention activities
Focus on: Reducing injuries and improving compliance with OHSA and regulations
Prevention activities was the highest result since the survey started in 2016, but the overall negative score was due to higher serious injuries and fatalities, mental stress, and physical injuries and illnesses.
Measuring health and safety
Rather than measuring health and safety in individual workplaces, the index looks at Ontario as a whole.
To measure overall health and safety, we look at four components:
- Prevention: what is done to prevent work-related injuries and illnesses, like avoiding unnecessary risks and following health and safety rules.
- Empowerment and workplace culture: how people are involved in keeping workplaces healthy and safe and how they think about the priority placed on health and safety where they work.
- Enforcement and compliance: the compliance with health and safety regulations and severity of orders issued for poor health and safety practices.
- Injuries: the injuries and illnesses that occur and how often, how long it takes people to get back to work, and the severity of the injuries, including loss of life.
How it all adds up
The components are scored based on workplace health and safety data covering almost every sector of Ontario’s economy. Each component is weighted equally, and the four scores are added up to reach the single index measure.
The index tracks the yearly change in Ontario’s overall workplace health and safety, and is updated annually.
Resources
- Find more health and safety information about Ontario businesses
- Log into your online services account to access your health and safety statistics
- Our Health and Safety Excellence program helps you make your workplace safer, while earning rebates on your WSIB premiums; start the enrolment process today
- Learn about your health and safety responsibilities