Ontario researchers are developing an occupational health database that health-care providers can use to give patients better advice on occupational health and wellbeing.
Led by Dr. Anil Adisesh, an associate professor in the Department of Medicine at Dalhousie University, the project is a joint initiative of Dalhousie, Praxus Health and Occupational Health Clinics for Ontario Workers (OHCOW) and is funded by the Workplace Safety and Insurance Board (WSIB).
The pilot project, called ‘Work and Health in Primary Care in Ontario,’ wants to make it easier for care providers to recognize how a patient’s health issues might relate to their work, whether it’s an illness or injury caused on the job or an existing condition that impacts their ability to work.
“As far as primary care goes, most often, the interaction that primary care providers have with work is when a patient may come to them, asking about an injury most commonly,” Adisesh said during a June 25 webinar hosted by OHCOW.
“But it's also important to remember illnesses, in particular, because patients may not realize that the illness or symptoms they have may relate to work, and that's where an informed primary care provider can actually make the link.”
Over the last three to four years, Adisesh and his team have developed a 13-point questionnaire designed to find out about a patient’s work history and current health status.
The idea is that patients would fill out the questionnaire before seeing their physician, and their answers would help the physician get a better picture of the patient’s health and how it might impact their ability to do their job.
It starts off by asking about a patient’s employment status: how long a patient has been employed or, if they’re unemployed, how long they’ve been out of work.
These questions can give a physician insight into what kind of social network a patient has at work, or whether they may be suffering mentally because of unemployment.
“Also, if they've got any work exposures, then if you know how long they've been in that particular job, that also tells you something about how long they may have had those particular work exposures for,” Adisesh said.
The remainder of the questions are wide-ranging, addressing things like working multiple jobs simultaneously, shift work, hazardous exposures, whether a worker wears personal protective equipment, job satisfaction and more.
Right now, the form is a PDF that’s fillable and printable, but Adisesh said his team is working to make it an online tool that patients could use in clinics. As part of that, the tool would identify a patient’s job title and all the functions associated with it, pulling that information from existing Canadian and U.S. databases.
“We can summarize that and provide that to a primary care provider, so that you don't only know that somebody's a laser beam welder, but a few of the types of things that may be involved in doing that, which might involve getting in awkward postures, for instance, and it may involve certain strength requirements or certain cognitive requirements,” Adisesh said.
“And you can then consider somebody as they present to you and their abilities, what you think they would be.”
In this stage of the project, Adisesh said, his team wants to see how feasible and useful the questionnaire is in automatically capturing patient information.
“If this proves feasible, then that will provide an online tool that WSIB can offer to patients and providers to help capture that information,” Adisesh said.
“And since we're capturing it electronically, then it provides the possibility of creating a source of information on work health in Ontario.”
Right now, the research team is looking to recruit 15 clinics across Ontario, including in the North, that are willing to participate, Adisesh said, with his team providing all the training and support required.
Through the summer and into fall, researchers will recruit patients — they’re looking for a total of 1,000 to participate — followed by patient and provider interviews in late fall.
An analysis of their results will take place in early 2026, with the final results of the study expected next July.
For more information on the study, email WorkHealthPrimaryCare@dal.ca.
