2009 Research Retreat

Summary

Each year we hold a Researcher Day for our network of researchers. This has proven to be a very effective means of bringing our senior researchers together with our younger faculty researchers and graduate and under-graduate students. The event in June 2009, which was held at Laurentian University, was very well attended. Tammy Eger and a group of Laurentian researchers and students from the Department of Kinesiology were the organizers.

Kevin Kelloway from Saint Mary’s University in Nova Scotia delivered the keynote talk. His talk was open to the public and over 70 people attended. He has been involved in leadership training for over 15 years with corporations across Canada. His talk focused on Transformational Leadership for Safety that is based on a theory, intervention and training program that has been proven to work (improves safety climate and reduces injuries) and importantly, can be taught in as short a time as a half-day training program.

Richard Wells presented an overview of the Centre of Research Expertise for the Prevention of Musculoskeletal Disorders' (CRE-MSD) new research strategy. The day-long event was an opportunity to brainstorm on the 6Q Initiative, and gain feedback from the Centre’s researchers on their opinions whether the six questions capture the major research questions in the field. There were also six breakout sessions:

1. Research on Intervention and Implementation
2. Risk factor tracking and Assessment
3. Efficacy of common interventions
4. Graduate student sessions: what is working? What can we do better?
5. Evidence to Practice: Getting companies involved
6. Evidence to Practice: Knowledge Transfer. A very useful output of the day was a set of musculoskeletal disorder-messages that are now being used as the basis for a collaborative research question.