Clinical trial NCT04251429: Effectiveness of the Healthy Workplace Participatory Program with Peer-led Teams in Public Sector Healthcare Facilities
Official title: Safety and Health Through Integrated Facilitated Teams (SHIFT)
Study type: INTERVENTIONAL
Overall status: ENROLLING_BY_INVITATION
Phase: NA
Conditions: Work-Related Condition
Burnout, Caregiver
Work-related Injury
Musculoskeletal Pain
Keywords: participatory
employee engagement
process evaluation
work ability
Lead sponsor: University of Massachusetts, Lowell
Sponsor class: OTHER
Collaborators: name: National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH/CDC)
First posted: 2020-01-31
Enrollment: 3300
Sex: ALL
Minimum age (years): 18
Standard ages: ADULT
OLDER_ADULT
Accepts healthy volunteers: yes
Allocation: RANDOMIZED
Intervention model: CROSSOVER
Primary purpose: OTHER

Brief summary: 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.

Detailed description: 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:

-

Primary outcomes:
measure: Change in Team Attendance
timeFrame: Through study completion, an average of three years
measure: Change in Team Engagement
timeFrame: Through study completion, an average of three years
measure: Change in Level of Committee Activity
timeFrame: Through study completion, an average of three years
measure: Change in team-selected health/safety/well-being issue
timeFrame: Through study completion, an average of two years
Secondary outcomes:
measure: Proportion of content followed according to the HWPP protocol
timeFrame: Through study completion, an average of three years
measure: Change in scope of health/safety/well-being
timeFrame: Through study completion, an average of three years
measure: Shared labor-management awareness of job-related health issues
timeFrame: Through study completion, an average of two years
measure: Work Ability of Employees
timeFrame: Prior to random selection of immediate and delayed intervention site, and 3 years later
measure: Quality of Care of Patients/Residents: All-Employee Survey
timeFrame: Prior to random selection of immediate and delayed intervention site, and 3 years later
measure: Organizational Support for Health, Safety, and Wellbeing
timeFrame: Prior to random selection of immediate and delayed intervention site, and 3 years later
measure: Employee Burnout: Exhaustion and Disengagement
timeFrame: Prior to random selection of immediate and delayed intervention site, and 3 years later
measure: Frequency of Threats, Assault, and Harassment of Employees
timeFrame: Prior to random selection of immediate and delayed intervention site, and 3 years later
measure: Change in Worker Injuries
timeFrame: Through study completion, an average of five years
measure: Musculoskeletal Pain
timeFrame: Prior to random selection of immediate and delayed intervention site, and 3 years later
Other outcomes:
Locations:
Study officials:
affiliation: University of Massachusetts, Lowell
name: Laura Punnett, ScD
role: PRINCIPAL_INVESTIGATOR
References:
citation: Punnett L, Nobrega S, Zhang Y, Rice S, Gore R, Kurowski A; SHIFT Project Research Team. Safety and Health through Integrated, Facilitated Teams (SHIFT): stepped-wedge protocol for prospective, mixed-methods evaluation of the Healthy Workplace Participatory Program. BMC Public Health. 2020 Sep 29;20(1):1463. doi: 10.1186/s12889-020-09551-2.