Claire Benny

Biography:

Dr. Claire Benny (she/her) is an Assistant Professor in the School of Public Health at the University of Alberta and the Scientific Director of the Injury Prevention Centre. Claire holds a PhD in Epidemiology has interests in social justice, injury prevention, substance use, and causal inference methods. Her research focuses on the social determinants of injury risk, severity, and health post-injury. Claire holds a CRISM Research Development grant to study rates of drug poisoning post-workplace injury in Alberta.

Node Funded Project (Sept 2025)

Title: Estimating the burden of workplace injury in drug poisoning events: A population-based study of Alberta

Principal Investigators: Claire Benny

Co-investigators/collaborators: Skye Cummins

Description:

Workplace injuries are on the rise in Alberta, and limited evidence suggests that drug use may be a means of coping post-injury. Despite this insight, no existing research has estimated the degree to which workplace injury contributes to drug poisoning risk. Workplace injury and drug poisoning are disproportionately high in the prairie provinces, and specifically in Alberta. Thus, the main objective of this work is to estimate the excess burden of drug poisoning among those with existing workplace injuries living in Alberta.

The proposed research will use Census data (2016) linked to emergency department (ED) data from the National Ambulatory Care Reporting System (NACRS) in Alberta (2016-2021). This linkage represents a product coined ‘CanCHEC’, which is a longitudinal cohort established by probabilistically linking consenting participants from the Census to administrative health data. This study will represent a retrospective cohort study.