Saskatchewan WCB Unveils Work Injury Ad Campaign

The Saskatchewan Workers' Compensation Board (WCB) has launched an advertising campaign intended to drive home the impacts of work injuries and the importance of workplace safety and injury prevention.

The new campaign is part of Mission: Zero, a new WorkSafe Saskatchewan initiative to bring about faster and deeper reductions to the provincial work injury rate. The campaign was launched as part of the WCB's 2008 Annual General Meeting (AGM), held Wednesday in Saskatoon.

WCB Chairperson David Eberle told those attending the AGM that the advertising campaign's edgier approach reflects the urgency of ramping up public awareness of the scope of Saskatchewan's work injury experience.

"We have the sorry distinction of holding the second highest work injury rate in Canada. That's unacceptable," Eberle told the more than 100 people attending the meeting. "The new ads show how real injuries happen in real work places. We want the ads to get the attention of the people of Saskatchewan and motivate everyone to work with us to achieve zero work injuries."

Eberle said he understands others might view the goal of zero injuries as overly ambitious, but added that should not deter the WCB, its stakeholders and partners from, "keeping our eyes on the prize. Every work injury is predictable. That means it's also preventable".

Since his appointment in March of this year, Eberle said that Saskatchewan's work injury rate has had his full attention. "We've made great gains since the WCB started its prevention programming in 2002. But the injury rate persists. We need to be equally persistent."

Eberle noted that the number of reported injuries has been on a steady increase since the early 1990s and that the WCB received over 40,000 reports of work injuries in 2007. He added that amounted to "receiving nearly 200 reports of work injuries every day of every week last year".

The Mission: Zero campaign includes two television ads, four print ads, and Mission: Zero buses in Regina and Saskatoon. The television ads show an injury with a table saw at a construction site and a fall in a retail location. Both stop short of showing the injury, leaving it to the imagination of the viewer to complete the story. The print ads are a mix of work behaviours with a high risk of injury and one declaring that "The (work injury) statistics stink".