Northern Ontario workers stay longer on disability: study

A new study has found that northern Ontario workers spend more time off the job because of workplace illnesses and injuries than do their southern Ontario counterparts.

Sonja Senthanar found that disability claimants in the north were 16 per cent less likely to return to work during the five-year study period.

She did the research because she wanted to see if access to healthcare resources had an effect on people's recovery time, she said. 

"We do see that there's that large disparity in terms of physicians and specialists just because physicians tend to congregate more in urban metropolitan areas, versus remote or rural areas like that found in northern Ontario," she said.  

She was also curious to know if the difference in types of employment between northern and southern Ontario — specifically the fact that there is more resource-based work in northern Ontario — would affect disability duration, she said, adding that it didn't appear to.

Her study reviewed more than 150,000 lost time claims approved by the Workplace Safety and Insurance Board between 2006 and 2011.

Senthanar described it as a "good preliminary study" that shows "how northern Ontario may necessarily be lacking in terms of the disability management agenda in comparison to other geographical regions."

She did the study as part of her graduate work at Lakehead University.

She is currently doing follow-up research at the University of Waterloo.

The research is exploring the kinds of resources available to workers in northern Ontario and looking into whether there is a relationship between access to resources and the length of disability claims.

She is also looking for differences between different parts of northern Ontario.

The research is important because longer disability times mean lost productivity for the northern Ontario economy, Senthanar said.