Enhancing Total Worker Health® Culture through a Company-wide Worker-focused Introduction Training Program

PI: Emily Huang

The current study aims to develop and pilot test an introductory training component (Worker-Focused Training) focused on Total Worker Health (TWH) Culture/Climate. We will design and pilot a company-wide introductory training component for a broader multilevel and mobile TWH Culture Training Intervention Program. Our primary objective is to enhance TWH Culture and its associated outcomes. Our goal is to foster positive changes in safety, health, and well-being across all employee levels.

Organizational Safety Climate and Illness Prevention: A Call for Expanded Conceptualization, Measurement, and Interventions

PI: Rebecca Lindgren

This study looks to validate a newly developed Illness Prevention Safety Climate (IPSC) scale. Two studies will be undertaken, the first of which aims to validate the IPSC as a universal scale across occupations, while the second study is a multi-level validation so that the IPSC can be used across an organization. Both studies will investigate predictive and incremental validity toward illness prevention factors compared to currently used safety climate scale, which tend to have a specificity toward injury prevention factors.

Communal Meal Breaks at Work: A Social Connectedness Intervention

PI: Anjali Rameshbabu

This study responds to our national loneliness epidemic through an intervention that targets work design, social connection, and equity. This pilot project will lay the groundwork for communal meal breaks (CMB), an intervention to increase social connectedness among janitorial workers in healthcare. The aims of the study are to conduct qualitative research to identify current practices and implementation needs for CMB, develop a leadership-targeted CMB protocol, and conduct a feasibility test of CMB.

PIs and university organization: Dr. Liu-Qin Yang, Department of Psychology, Portland State University and Dr. Nanette Yragui, Safety and Health and Research for Prevention (SHARP) Washington Department of Labor & Industries
Description: This qualitative study will adapt and extend an existing intervention focused on preventing aggression and supporting safety in work life among nurses in the Pacific Northwest. Grounded in the Total Worker Health® and the intervention literatures, the research team intends to use multiple intervention activities to teach and strengthen nursing supervisors' day-to-day skills in effectively supporting their nursing team needs to manage and prevent workplace aggression and work-life stress.

PIs and university organization: Dr. Emily Huang, Associate Professor, Oregon Institute of Occupational Health Sciences, OHSU
Description: This study addresses the crucial need for a broadly applicable, reliable, and valid Total Worker Health® (TWH) Climate Scale that assesses various levels of organizational leadership, including managers and supervisors. Such a scale would play a key role in identifying workplace strengths, pinpointing areas for improvement, and predicting outcomes related to safety, health, and well-being. By leveraging data from a prior TWH climate scale development project that focused on the company level (funded by the current OHWC Center grant), the primary objective of the current study is to finalize the development and validation of a supervisor-level TWH Climate Scale to complete the comprehensive TWH Climate Assessment Tool. The second objective of this study is to develop a supervisor-level TWH climate training with an accompanying behavior-tracking process. 

MPIs: Dr. Brad Wipfli, Dr. Steven Shea

Exposure to sedentary work is an occupational hazard with significant health and safety consequences, including increased risk of heart disease, diabetes, early mortality, musculoskeletal pain, injuries, and detrimental changes in physiological functioning. As the number of sedentary jobs in the US continues to grow, effective interventions to reduce sedentary behavior in the workplace are increasingly important. This multilevel intervention will examine the effectiveness of varying doses of a Total Worker Health intervention, aimed at maximizing the utilization of health and safety resources, for reducing sedentary behavior and prolonged sitting among call center employees, who are among the most sedentary workers in the US.

MPIs: Dr. Ryan Olson, Dr. Peter W. Johnson

Sleep deficiency is a crosscutting factor for Total Worker Health that not only impacts workplace safety, but also generates excess risk for obesity, chronic disease, and early mortality. This is particularly true in long-haul trucking where drivers face very challenging sleeping conditions. Our project will focus on truck driver teams (pairs), where one driver sleeps in a moving vehicle while the other partner drives. Team drivers experience twice as many awakenings as solo drivers. We will evaluate engineering and behavioral interventions to improve sleep, reduce fatigue, and impact Total Worker Health. An enhanced cab intervention will alter whole body vibrations during driving and sleep periods, and includes a therapeutic mattress system and an active suspension seat. The enhanced cab will be evaluated alone and in combination with a behavioral sleep intervention adapted from our effective SHIFT (Safety & Health Involvement For Truckers) program. The interventions prioritize hazard reduction according to the hierarchy of controls, and will be evaluated with a randomized controlled design.

“Communities of Practice” in safety and health for home care workers (Ryan Olson, PI)
Using a peer-led curriculum to organize home care workers into neighborhood-based WorkLife teams that provide education and social support for improving lifestyle (e.g., diet, exercise) and safety behaviors.

SHIP supervisor training (Leslie Hammer and Donald Truxillo, PIs)
Training supervisors to use a team-based approach to support balance in employee’s work-family demands thus reducing stress and improving safety in City of Portland construction workers.

• Supervisor training to promote health/safety in construction (Kent Anger, PI)
  Training supervisor skills supported by behavior tracking technology in Latino and non-Latino supervisors in construction to motivate their employees to adopt and safer work practices and make healthier lifestyle choices (based on an employee training program on healthy lifestyles).

Download our one-pagers  from OHWC's first grant cycle from 2011 to 2016 to highlight our impacts, efforts and accomplishments workplace safety, health and well-being research:

• Our Impact Statement: Significant Outcomes and Lives Touched
• Interventions and Effect Sizes