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Our vision is “Keeping people safe and healthy at work.” It guides and supports everything we do. We’re fully committed to bringing every New Brunswick worker home safely to their loved ones at the end of each day.

For workers and their families, a safety-first culture means they can enjoy a continued high quality of life. While someone’s quality of life is subjective, it may include things such as ongoing participation in family, work, leisure and educational activities. For businesses, a safety-first culture promotes more than safety. It benefits worker confidence and retention, employee engagement, organizational behaviour and even productivity.

An organizational restructuring to enable WorkSafeNB to better serve our stakeholders today and into the future resulted in the creation of an important new executive leader position – that of vice-president of prevention. Previously, the executive leader in that role was accountable for prevention, adjudication and rehabilitation services, but we recognized the importance of prevention as a singular focus and were pleased to appoint Tim Petersen to the position. In his first full year at the helm of the new division in 2019, Tim and his staff have contributed to a healthier and safer province.

This singular focus on prevention impels not only the vice-president, but every single employee in the prevention division. By concentrating exclusively on prevention, the team is better able to implement programs and processes dedicated to ensuring a safety-first culture, one committed to eliminating workplace injuries and occupational disease.

While our goal is to prevent workplace injuries from occurring, when they do occur we are there to help the worker recover from their injury and assist in a safe return to work as early as possible. Effective return-to-work (RTW) practices and appropriate and timely medical care are fundamental to getting workers back to the job safely after an illness or injury.

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For some people, the hardest part of being injured in the workplace isn’t the rehabilitation or the pain of an injury – it’s being off work.

Just ask Blaine Denton.

In June 2019, the property supervisor and handyman was renovating an apartment unit in Saint John when he tripped and fell while carrying a box.

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As stewards of New Brunswick’s workers’ compensation system, WorkSafeNB is accountable to our stakeholders to ensure that workers have the funds and services needed to support them if they are injured at work. To guarantee those funds and services are always available, we collect assessments from employers, but we also must ensure they pay fair rates that enable them to keep contributing to our provincial economy. This delicate balance must be maintained – without it there is no workers’ compensation system.

Under the Workers’ Compensation Act, WorkSafeNB met its legislative funding target of 100%. WorkSafeNB, however, has set its own funding goal in policy of 115-125%, a measurement we did not meet, but made improvement toward, in 2019. It is important to note that the 2019 assessment rate is set in 2018 and based on the claiming trends and financial health of WorkSafeNB at that time.

Setting our assessment rate requires striking the right balance between fair compensation benefits for injured workers, and fair assessment rates for employers. It means ensuring that the rates provide for current and future claims costs, as well as for the costs of administering the legislation.

The legislative amendments enacted in December 2018 and subsequent amendments in 2019 have positively impacted our operational results, and we believe will help us meet our targets of system sustainability in the coming years.