Engaging community physicians on COVID-19 prevention in the workplace

Issue: BCMJ, vol. 64, No. 2, March 2022, Page 81 WorkSafeBC COVID-19
By: Jacqueline Holmes

Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, WorkSafeBC has continued to deliver its essential services across the province. Those include prevention services to help ensure workers remain safe.

Every year, we focus our prevention efforts on high-risk work activities in health care and community social services worksites under our high-risk strategy. With the pandemic, we’ve had to shift our focus to also include reducing the risk of workplace COVID-19 transmission.

Engaging community physicians has been a key element of our COVID-19 prevention response, for two reasons. First, physicians and their staff play an important role as health care providers to the injured workers we support. Second, with the high risk of COVID-19 transmission in health care, physicians play an instrumental role as employers in keeping their own workplaces and workers safe.

How we’ve been engaging community physicians

From January 2020 to 21 December 2021, we engaged with 122 community physician offices and employers on health and safety matters related to the pandemic. These engagements consisted of 85 workplace inspections conducted by our prevention officers to verify that employers are meeting their obligations to manage the risk of COVID-19 in their workplaces and 37 consultations conducted by our Occupational Health and Safety Consultation and Education Services team to share information and guidance specific to the needs of the employer.

In May 2020, one of our Prevention Services team members and a medical advisor copresented, as panelists, a webinar titled “Office-based primary care: Safety for your patients, your staff, and yourself” in the COVID-19 UBC CPD webinar series.

Our continuing engagement

In recognition of the important role community physicians play in worker health and safety, WorkSafeBC will continue to engage with you on both your pandemic and nonpandemic workplace health and safety needs.

We’ll also provide updates on health and safety information that is relevant to physicians and your industry group, including changes to regulations and health and safety resources. We would like to hear your feedback about industry-specific health and safety concerns and challenges, and we will incorporate this feedback when reviewing current resources or developing new ones in collaboration with Doctors of BC.

For more information

Visit www.worksafebc.com to learn more about COVID-19 prevention and our Health Care and Social Services High Risk Strategy. Contact our Prevention Information Line at 604 276-3100 or 1 888 621-SAFE if you have questions or concerns about workplace health and safety.
—Jacqueline Holmes
Manager, Prevention Field Services

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This article is the opinion of WorkSafeBC and has not been peer reviewed by the BCMJ Editorial Board.

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Jacqueline Holmes. Engaging community physicians on COVID-19 prevention in the workplace. BCMJ, Vol. 64, No. 2, March, 2022, Page(s) 81 - WorkSafeBC, COVID-19.


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