Education and Training to Build Capacity in Total Worker Health®: Proposed Competencies for an Emerging Field

Creating Shared Perspectives for Worker Well-being: A Community Health-Focused Certificate in Total Worker Health®

OBJECTIVES

This study aimed to highlight the utility of a new certificate program in Total Worker Health ® (TWH) designed for health professionals in other community health settings (OCHS).

METHODS

Stakeholder needs assessment, priority setting, and comparison with existing core competencies in TWH approaches were performed to identify learning objectives and curricular threads in alignment with adult learning principles. Faculty-student pairings were conducted for content and assessment development.

RESULTS

A free six-module training course that prepares OCHS professionals to collaborate with occupational safety and health (OSH) professionals.

CONCLUSIONS

TWH can be advanced through collaboration between OSH and OCHS professionals. In service of shared ground, OCHS professionals should articulate the influence of work on health, TWH principles, and OSH vocabulary and concepts. Such training is a necessary step toward facilitating groups for the benefit of all work and workers.

Let's Learn Together! A Mixed-Methods Study to Assess Readiness for Interprofessional Education on Total Worker Health® Practice

BACKGROUND

Occupational safety and health (OSH) professionals increasingly need interdisciplinary collaborative practice competencies to respond to complex worker safety, health, and well-being risks. Effective collaboration with non-OSH-trained professionals (e.g., health promotion, human resources) is critical for planning integrated interventions that address work and non-work risks, consistent with a "Total Worker Health" (TWH) approach. Interprofessional education (IPE) pedagogy offers skill-building for interdisciplinary collaboration, but little attention has been given to IPE in OSH education and training literature. The goal of this study was to assess OSH professionals' perceptions about IPE to guide application in postgraduate TWH education.

METHODS

The mixed-methods study involved 210 U.S. professionals in safety (31%), industrial hygiene (16%), occupational nursing (12%) and medicine (11%), and related disciplines (30%). Participants completed a 12-item Readiness for Interprofessional Education Scale (RIPLS) adapted for TWH. Nineteen survey-takers also participated in virtual focus groups to share opinions about IPE benefits, barriers, and desirable course features.

FINDINGS

Occupational safety and health professionals reported high overall readiness for IPE (RIPLS, 4.45 ± 0.47), endorsing IPE for interdisciplinary skill-building. Salient IPE motivators were learning new perspectives from diverse disciplines and industries; gaining new subject expertise; developing common ground across disciplines; and learning TWH best practices. Participants recommended case studies to practice interdisciplinary problem-solving through group work.

CONCLUSIONS/APPLICATION TO PRACTICE

Interprofessional education is a promising pedagogy for OSH continuing education to promote interdisciplinary collaboration skills needed for TWH practice in the workplace. Occupational safety and health educators need to build competency in IPE pedagogical theory and practice to ensure effective training design and evaluation.

The Potential for Total Worker Health® Approaches in State and Territorial Health Departments : A National Mixed-Methods Study

OBJECTIVE

To document the extent to which state and territorial health departments (SHDs) integrate their occupational safety and health (OSH) and workplace health promotion (WHP) activities consistent with a Total Worker Health (TWH) approach.

METHODS

Nationally representative survey of OSH and WHP practitioners at 56 SHDs followed by in-depth interviews.

RESULTS

Despite reporting limited awareness of the TWH initiative and TWH resources, most respondents (57% OSH, 64% WHP) reported collaboration between OSH and WHP staff in their departments. Collaborations were described in-depth. Barriers to OSH-WHP collaborations included resource insufficiencies, organizational structure in the SHD, and conflicting practices. Facilitators included knowledge of TWH approaches, proximity to TWH Centers of Excellence, proximity between OSH/WHP programs, and leadership initiative. Motivations for collaboration were enumerated.

CONCLUSIONS

Strategies for building TWH capacity and activity among SHDs are discussed.

Expanding the Focus of Occupational Safety and Health: Lessons from a Series of Linked Scientific Meetings

There is widespread recognition that the world of work is changing, and agreement is growing that the occupational safety and health (OSH) field must change to contribute to the protection of workers now and in the future. Discourse on the evolution of OSH has been active for many decades, but formalized support of an expanded focus for OSH has greatly increased over the past 20 years. Development of approaches such as the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH)'s Total Worker Health® concept and the World Health Organization (WHO)'s Healthy Workplace Framework are concrete examples of how OSH can incorporate a new focus with a wider view. In 2019, NIOSH initiated a multi-year effort to explore an expanded focus for OSH. This paper is a report on the outputs of a three-year cooperative agreement between NIOSH and The University of Texas School of Public Health, which led to subject matter expert workshops in 2020 and an international conference of global interest groups in 2021. This article traces the background of these meetings and identifies and assesses the lessons learned. It also reviews ten thematic topics that emerged from the meetings: worker health inequalities; training new OSH professionals; future OSH research and practice; tools to measure well-being of workers; psychosocial hazards and adverse mental health effects; skilling, upskilling and improving job quality; socioeconomic influences; climate change; COVID-19 pandemic influences; and strategic foresight. Cross-cutting these themes is the need for systems and transdisciplinary thinking and operationalization of the concept of well-being to prepare the OSH field for the work of the future.

Attitudes of Company Executives toward a Comprehensive Workplace Health Management-Results of an Exploratory Cross-Sectional Study in Germany

Workplace health management (WHM) in Germany aims at maintaining and increasing the health and well-being of employees. Little is known about company executives’ attitudes toward WHM. To gain more insight, we conducted a large-scale survey in companies in the German county of Reutlingen in 2017. We sent a standardized questionnaire to 906 companies, containing inter alia 26 self-constructed declarative statements depicting company executives’ opinions on various WHM aspects; 222 questionnaires could be evaluated. By exploratory factor analysis we assigned the 26 items to six factors reflecting different attitudes toward WHM. Factor values were standardized to a scale from 0 to 10. The attitude ‘positive view of general health services in the company’, for example, achieved by far the lowest mean agreement (3.3 points). For the attitude ‘general skepticism toward WHM’, agreement and disagreement were balanced (5.0 points). Using multiple regression analyses, we searched for variables that could partially explain respondents’ agreement with attitudes. In conclusion, a general WHM skepticism was widespread, but not dominant. The idea that general health services should be offered in companies was predominantly rejected. Older respondents and respondents from smaller companies and craft enterprises were more skeptical than average about WHM and its possible extensions.

Impact of Advising on Total Worker Health Implementation

OBJECTIVE

Little is understood about the mechanisms for improving the adoption and implementation of Total Worker Health® (TWH) in workplace settings. The primary objective of this study was to identify whether the delivery of TWH advising is associated with subsequent changes in TWH in small-to-medium sized businesses.

METHODS

We conducted a longitudinal study of a TWH intervention in 200 organizations completing Health Links Healthy Workplace Assessments™ between October 2016 and December 2019. Organizations were offered consultation via telephonic and live web-based advising sessions.

RESULTS

Organizations exhibited non-significant albeit positive change in assessment scores from baseline to assessment 2. Businesses receiving advising showed significant score improvements from assessment 2 to 3, versus those without advising.

CONCLUSIONS

TWH consultation may enhance adoption of organizational behaviors that promote worker health, safety, and well-being over time.

How Will the Future of Work Shape the OSH Professional of the Future? A Workshop Summary

Rapid and profound changes anticipated in the future of work will have significant implications for the education and training of occupational safety and health (OSH) professionals and the workforce. As the nature of the workplace, work, and the workforce change, the OSH field must expand its focus to include existing and new hazards (some yet unknown), consider how to protect the health and well-being of a diverse workforce, and understand and mitigate the safety implications of new work arrangements. Preparing for these changes is critical to developing proactive systems that can protect workers, prevent injury and illness, and promote worker well-being. An in-person workshop held on February 3–4, 2020 at The University of Texas Health Science Center (UTHealth) School of Public Health in Houston, Texas, USA, examined some of the challenges and opportunities OSH education will face in both academic and industry settings. The onslaught of the COVID-19 global pandemic reached the United States one month after this workshop and greatly accelerated the pace of change. This article summarizes presentations from national experts and thought leaders across the spectrum of OSH and professionals in the fields of strategic foresight, systems thinking, and industry, and provides recommendations for the field.