2009 Research Retreat

Overview

Keywords: Leadership; Workplace safety

Timeline: June 18 -19, 2009

Presenters: Centre of Research Expertise for the Prevention of Musculoskeletal Disorders (CRE-MSD) and Laurentian University

Funder: CRE-MSD

Project type: Workshop

Partners: Laurentian University

Sector/Workplace type: All

Theme:
Theme 4 Interventions
Theme 5 Implementation

Background/rationale

Holding a CRE-MSD  Researcher Day for our network of researchers 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. 

Goals and process

70 faculty researchers and students attended the two-day event at Laurentian University. The first half of the retreat consisted of presentations and the second half consisted of break-out sessions.

Summary

The keynote speaker, Kevin Kelloway, 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 CRE-MSD’s 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.

Implications for the prevention of MSDs

A very useful output of the day was a set of MSD-messages that are now being used as the basis for collaborative research questions.

Knowledge dissemination

For full summary see the 2009 Research Retreat event page.