Measuring integrated approaches to advance worker safety, health and wellbeing.

Details

• Personal Author:
  Katz JN ; McLellan DL ; Pronk NP ; Schult TM ; Sorensen, Glorian ; Wagner, Gregory R. ; Williams JA
• Description:
  Statement of problem: Improving the safety, health, and wellbeing of workers through integrated approaches is the essence of Total Worker Health® (TWH) as conceptualized by the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) (Schill & Chosewood, 2013). As awareness of TWH has grown, there have been calls for the design, evaluation, and implementation of measurement tools and interventions (Loeppke et al., 2015; Sorensen et al., 2013). There are several tools that can be used to assess the integration of worker health protection and promotion, most at the organizational level (Pronk et al., 2016) as well as a checklist metric similar to the Dow Jones Sustainability Index (Loeppke et al., 2015). Given the rapidly expanding set of measurement tools, validation and testing of measures of integration is critically important. Procedures: Developing and validating a measurement instrument for integrated approaches to address personal and workplace safety and health factors has been a major focus of the Harvard T.H. Chan Center for Work, Health, and Wellbeing for the past several years. Initially, an instrument was developed using a modified Delphi process based on the definition of integration as "a strategic and operational coordination of policies, programs, and practices designed to simultaneously prevent work-related injuries and illnesses and enhance overall workforce health and well-being" (Sorensen et al., 2013). This process yielded an instrument, the Indicators of Integration, with several domains to concretely capture organizational policies, processes, program content, and leadership, that make up integrated approaches to advancing worker health and wellbeing. Additional work was then undertaken to validate the instrument in multiple samples. Analyses: The initial validation work used a survey of small- to medium- sized employers (N=111) to address the convergent validity and reliability of the 23-item instrument (J. A. R. Williams et al., 2015). Additional work extended the validation to include a sample of Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) administrative parents (collection of all the points of service that a VA leadership group manage, N=140), testing the dimensionality of the instrument in both samples (J. A. Williams et al., 2016). Results: The initial validation study found excellent reliability using Cronbach's alpha coefficient as well as positive associations of the Indicators of Integration with organizational policies and strategies to protect and promote safety and health (J. A. R. Williams et al., 2015). Validation in the VA sample also showed the Indicators of Integration to be reliable (J. A. Williams et al., 2016). Exploratory factor analysis in two samples identified the instrument as one unified factor (J. A. Williams et al., 2016). A few questions could potentially be dropped from the instrument; but additional work is needed to determine whether this is the case in other samples. Practical implications: Slight adaptations were made to the VA version of the Indicators of Integration, such as changing examples of programs/policies to make them relevant to the VA. Even with these slight changes the validation and dimensionality assessments were nearly the same as results obtained from the survey of small- to medium-sized employers- such changes may make the instrument more organization specific but not adversely affect validity. Recent work tested the practical applications of measures of integration; it described the Indicators of Integration and their use in conjunction with additional measurement tools to provide integrated feedback and plans of action to three employers over the course of a year (Pronk et al., 2016). The quantitative and qualitative results of this study documented change among the involved employers as well as the palatability and usefulness of the approach from both the perspectives of management and employees (Pronk et al., 2016). The use of both organizational and individual measures as well as the provision of feedback and action plans demonstrates the feasibility of using measurement of TWH concepts of integration to guide change at a practical level. Conclusions: Efforts to measure and implement integrated approaches to address personal and workplace safety and health have been shown to be feasible. The Indicators of Integration, along with other metrics can be used to measure organization's levels of integration and to provide feedback that can be acted on by employers. [Description provided by NIOSH]
• Subjects:
  Health Promotion Occupational Health Safety Surveys And Questionnaires
• Keywords:
  TWH; Total Worker Health; Worker safety; Health promotion; Work organization; Questionnaires; Statistical quality control
• Publisher:
  American Psychological Association
• Document Type:
  Text
• Funding:
  Cooperative Agreement
• Genre:
  Abstract or Summary
• Place as Subject:
  Kansas ; Massachusetts ; Minnesota ; OSHA Region 1 ; OSHA Region 5 ; OSHA Region 7
• CIO:
  National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH)
• Topic:
  Workplace Safety & Health
• Location:
  North America
• Pages in Document:
  1
• NIOSHTIC Number:
  nn:20065687
• Citation:
  Work, Stress and Health 2017: Contemporary Challenges and Opportunities, The 12th International Conference on Occupational Stress and Health, June 7-10, 2017, Minneapolis, Minnesota. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association, 2017 Jun; :1
• Contact Point Address:
  Jessica A.R. Williams, PhD, Department of Health Policy and Management, University of Kansas Medical Center, Mail Stop 3044, 3901 Rainbow Blvd, Kansas City, KS 66160
• Email:
  jwilliams13@kumc.edu
• Federal Fiscal Year:
  2017
• NORA Priority Area:
  Healthcare and Social Assistance ; Construction
• Performing Organization:
  Harvard University, Boston, Massachusetts
• Peer Reviewed:
  False
• Start Date:
  20070901
• Source Full Name:
  Work, Stress and Health 2017: Contemporary Challenges and Opportunities, The 12th International Conference on Occupational Stress and Health, June 7-10, 2017, Minneapolis, Minnesota
• End Date:
  20260831
• Collection(s):
  National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health
• Main Document Checksum:
  urn:sha-512:f9fa189274835176d7cd2eb7fda9577165417c6d8be3b839b6879fbd8a249ee06cbc709e3473761431553ff22e07f2e79ff78c1e55add909ec7226d3b712a0bf
• Download URL:
  https://stacks.cdc.gov/view/cdc/249511/cdc_249511_DS1.pdf
• File Type:
  [PDF - 328.62 KB ]