Effectiveness of the Healthy Workplace Participatory Program with Peer-led Teams in Public Sector Healthcare Facilities

Safety \& Health through Integrated, Facilitated Teams (SHIFT) is an intervention study to enhance employee health, safety, and well-being in public sector healthcare institutions in New England. The investigators will evaluate the effectiveness of an adapted form of the Center for the Promotion of Health in the New England Workplace (CPH-NEW) Healthy Workplace Participatory Program (HWPP) for strengthening cohesiveness, engagement, and impact of pre-existing joint labor-management health and safety committees.

The sites are enrolled in three pairs, matched by agency and type of services. For each pair of sites, one will be randomly selected for immediate HWPP coaching. The paired organization will serve as a control until the study mid-point, at which time all sites will be coached. Process evaluations will examine barriers to and facilitators of program uptake, reach, and effectiveness. Survey data and injury records will be examined in intervention and control groups to describe the frequencies of workplace and non-occupational exposures of selected health outcomes.

Safety \& Health through Integrated, Facilitated Teams (SHIFT) is a five-year study with etiologic, intervention, and translational research components. Six public sector healthcare institutions are enrolled, in three pairs matched by agency and type of services. The sites are four Massachusetts state healthcare facilities, which have recently been mandated by law to achieve "Occupational Health and Safety Administration (OSHA) equivalent compliance," and two Veterans Administration facilities each of which has multiple nationally mandated programs addressing employee health and safety. Using a "stepped wedge" design, one of each pair will be randomly selected as the immediate intervention site, while the other facility will be the concurrent control or "lagged intervention" site, having access only to technical reports and information until mid-project, when it will also receive the full intervention.

The intervention is the CPH-NEW Healthy Workplace Participatory Program (HWPP), a process for increasing the effectiveness of occupational health and safety committees or peer-led employee teams, through root cause analysis, prioritizing health and safety needs for effective problem-solving, identifying feasible interventions, and presenting these to leadership. Each facility has a pre-existing labor-management health and safety committee (HSC), which is the unit of intervention, so the HWPP will be adapted to joint management-labor teams. The committee is a partner in designing the program to fit the constraints and needs of the specific workplace and workforce. The research team provides training, coaching in the HWPP process, technical information, and practical assistance to committee members, facilitators, champions and leadership.

Etiologic research will entail analysis of baseline data for cross-sectional associations of work organization with worker health indicators. Intervention research will entail effectiveness and cost-outcome analysis of the HWPP. Outcomes will be both generic indicators of employee well-being and specific outcomes appropriate to the topics that the HSC's select for intervention. Translational research (process evaluation) will evaluate the efficacy of the dissemination and training strategy, as well as obstacles to and facilitators of uptake and implementation.

Eligibility Criteria:
Inclusion Criteria:

* Direct employee of the agency (not temporary agency or subcontractor)

Exclusion Criteria:

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