Healthy Workplaces for Health Workers
(Tuesday March 6th, 2007)

Judith Shamian and Fadi El-Jardali have published an article, Healthy Workplaces for Health Workers in Canada: Knowledge Transfer and Uptake in Policy and Practice, in Healthcare Papers, 7(Sp) 2007: 6-25. A summary follows and the full text is available on line:

The World Health Report launched the Health Workforce Decade (2006-2015), with high priority given for countries to develop effective workforce strategies including healthy workplaces for health workers. Evidence shows that healthy workplaces improve recruitment and retention, workers' health and well-being, quality of care and patient safety, organizational performance and societal outcomes. Over the past few years, healthy workplace issues in Canada have been on the agenda of many governments and employers.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a progress update, using different data-collection approaches, on knowledge transfer and uptake of research evidence in policy and practice, including the next steps for the healthy workplace agenda in Canada.

While there has been significant progress in bringing policy changes as a result of research evidence, our synthesis suggests that more work is needed to ensure that existing policy initiatives bring effective changes to the workplace.

Across Canada, many initiatives to improve the working conditions for HHR are currently under way, but the continuing concerns suggest that barriers remain. An assessment of the progress to date is necessary in order to inform the next steps for research, policy and practice.