Ontario Workplace Health and Safety Records Now Available Online

Ontario's Workplace Safety and Insurance Board (WSIB) recently launched a new online tool to make health and safety a matter of public record. Compass lets Ontarians find and compare health and safety statistics for businesses across Ontario.

Specifically, Compass allows users to do the following.

Find information related to the number and types of injuries that occur in a particular workplace.

Get a sense of the seriousness of workplace injuries by examining the following:

1. How many accident victims were off work past the day of an incident
2. How many accident victims were still receiving benefits a year after an accident

Compare health and safety statistics between specific businesses with users being able to narrow their search by business name, type and size.

Accessibility

Compass will make workplace data more accessible, and it's critical that organizations continue to enforce workplace health and safety practices to a high standard.

Failing to do so not only jeopardizes the well-being of a workforce, but it could also lead to a poor public image now that safety records are accessible to everyone. Easily accessible health and safety data has a number of additional benefits, including the following:

1. Informs and improves workplace decision-making on health and safety, prevention, and return to work strategies.
2. Allows organizations and the general public to see injury claims and benefit payments by year.
3. Creates downloadable information for research, planning, and presentations.
4. Allows companies to compare themselves to similar workplaces.
5. Allows larger enterprises to compare internal divisions or departments that are separately registered with the WSIB.
6. Gives potential and current employees the opportunity to review health and safety records.

It should be noted that Compass is part of a larger initiative, the Province of Ontario's Open Government Initiative. This initiative, along with the Province of Ontario's Open Data Directive, is intended to make the government and businesses more transparent by maximized public access to data that is not of a legal, private, sensitive or confidential nature.

The WSIB said that Compass will be rolled out in phases, with future versions giving businesses additional information to improve health and safety as well as return to work and injury prevention outcomes.

For an instructional video on how to use Compass, click here.