The Center for Work, Health, and Well-being: four pillars of our approach.

Details

• Personal Author:
  Burke L
• Description:
  The mission of the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health Center for Work, Health, & Well-being, one of six Total Worker Health® Centers of Excellence, is to protect and promote the health, safety, and well-being of workers through designing, implementing, and disseminating effective workplace policies, programs, and practices. Over the past 20 years, researchers at our Center have endeavored to expand the evidence supporting an integrated approach and to develop the resources to apply it. The Center's approach to outreach and education is comprised of four pillars: Disseminating Evidence-Based Practices The Center creates best practices to simultaneously improve working conditions and optimize health and safety investments in multiple industries. The Center's Workplace Integrated Safety and Health (WISH) Assessment measures effective workplace organizational policies, programs, and practices, and focuses on working conditions and organizational facilitators of worker safety, health, and well-being. The WISH Assessment is based on the Center's validated ''Indicators of Integration'' that were designed to assess the extent to which an organization has implemented an approach integrating occupational safety and health with worksite health promotion. The WISH assessment measures six core constructs identified as central to best practices and may inform organizational priority setting and guide research around causal pathways influencing implementation and outcomes related to these approaches. Several Center studies are utilizing WISH Assessment items, testing their psychometric properties. Shaping Workplace and Public Policy To inform policy decisions affecting the workforce, the Center examines the potential impact its research has on policies that enhance worker health and safety while supporting productivity and engagement. Our Center's Policy Working Group identifies, examines, and influences workplace and public policy issues related to Total Worker Health® by bringing together policy experts to explore implications of our past and current research. These experts recommend changes to workplace and public policies that can improve worker health, safety, and well-being. In addition, as part of our evaluation process, we examine how the research findings published by the Center can inform policy decision makers. The Center has also created "Policy Implication Summary Sheets" based on recent publications and written for non-academic audiences. These convey key messages from our research in non-academic language, for use at Conferences and available on the Center's website. Building Organizational Capacity to Improve the Conditions of Work To support organizations in adopting an integrated approach, the Center trains professionals, presents at conferences and on webinars, and mentors students and post-docs. These efforts are based on the Center's conceptual framework targeting the conditions of work, including physical environment, organization of work, psychosocial factors, and job tasks & demands. The Center's "Guidelines for Implementing an Integrated Approach" provides organizations with a framework for implementing a TWH integrated approach to worker safety, health, and well-being, as well as strategies, organizational processes, tools and links to other resources. The Center's capacity building suite is based on the Guidelines and its accompanying tools and resources. The Center regularly offers an Executive and Continuing Professional Education course, "Work, Health, and Well-being: Framework, Evidence, and Applications", and has recently participated in the design and delivery of a Harvard EdX MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) on the Culture of Health. Basing It upon the Center's Groundbreaking Research The foundation of our Center's work continues to be groundbreaking research. The Center's research projects and initiatives study the effectiveness of workplace policies and practices designed to support and protect workers; and demonstrate how an integrated approach targeting working conditions improves outcomes for employees and organizations. We currently are involved in three primary research projects - in Healthcare, Construction and Nursing Homes. Among the other Center projects is a collaboration with the Boston Fire Department and the Boston Firefighters Local 718, which has provided opportunities for the Center to examine factors in fire stations that may be impacting firefighter cancer risk. Pilot study findings were published in the Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine and then translated for a non-academic audience and published in Firehouse Magazine, a firefighter trade publication. [Description provided by NIOSH]
• Subjects:
  Health Promotion Occupational Health Safety
• Keywords:
  TWH; Total Worker Health; Health promotion; Information dissemination; Worker safety; Policy; Work organization
• Publisher:
  American Psychological Association
• Document Type:
  Text
• Funding:
  Cooperative Agreement
• Genre:
  Abstract or Summary
• Place as Subject:
  Massachusetts ; OSHA Region 1 ; OSHA Region 3 ; Pennsylvania
• CIO:
  National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH)
• Topic:
  Workplace Safety & Health
• Location:
  North America
• Pages in Document:
  232-233
• NIOSHTIC Number:
  nn:20065672
• Citation:
  Work, Stress and Health 2019, November 6-9, 2019, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association, 2019 Nov; :232-233
• Federal Fiscal Year:
  2020
• Performing Organization:
  Harvard University, Boston, Massachusetts
• Peer Reviewed:
  False
• Start Date:
  20070901
• Source Full Name:
  Work, Stress and Health 2019, November 6-9, 2019, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
• End Date:
  20260831
• Collection(s):
  National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health
• Main Document Checksum:
  urn:sha-512:36bb2a1c66a1a4d60376a9a3386a482e320b6815a02ac4e781c48e94199b9cc3d47f14ad76e453d184a0f29c87744249ab193d97ab91798f42d1ac59e27ecf78
• Download URL:
  https://stacks.cdc.gov/view/cdc/249504/cdc_249504_DS1.pdf
• File Type:
  [PDF - 113.66 KB ]