Abstract
BackgroundContact centres are one of the most sedentary workplaces, with employees spending a very high proportion of their working day sitting down. About a quarter of contact centre staff regularly experience musculoskeletal health problems due to high levels of sedentary behaviour, including lower back pain. There have been no previous randomised studies specifically aiming to reduce sedentary behaviour in contact centre staff. To address this gap, the Stand Up for Health (SUH) study aims to test the feasibility and acceptability of a complex theory-based intervention to reduce sedentary behaviour in contact centres.MethodsThe Stand Up for Health study has a stepped wedge cluster randomised trial design, which is a pragmatic design whereby clusters (contact centres) are randomised to time points at which they will begin to receive the intervention. All contact centre staff have the opportunity to experience the intervention. To minimise the resource burden in this feasibility study, data collection is not continuous, but undertaken on a selective number of occasions, so the stepped wedge design is “incomplete”. Eleven contact centres in England and Scotland have been recruited, and the sample size is approximately 27 per centre (270 in total). The statistical analysis will predominantly focus on assessing feasibility, including the calculation of recruitment rates and rates of attrition. Exploratory analysis will be performed to compare objectively measured sedentary time in the workplace (measured using an activPAL™ device) between intervention and control conditions using a linear mixed effects regression model.DiscussionTo our knowledge, this is the first stepped wedge feasibility study conducted in call centres. The rationale and justification of our novel staircase stepped wedge design has been presented, and we hope that by presenting our study design and statistical analysis plan, it will contribute to the literature on stepped wedge trials, and in particular feasibility stepped wedge trials. The findings of the study will also help inform whether this is a suitable design for other settings where data collection is challenging.Trial registrationThe trial has been registered on the ISRCTN database: http://www.isrctn.com/ISRCTN11580369
Highlights
Contact centres are one of the most sedentary workplaces, with employees spending a very high proportion of their working day sitting down
The main aim of this paper is to present the rationale for the stepped wedge study design used in Stand Up for Health
Stepped wedge studies are a pragmatic and cost-effective way of undertaking feasibility studies for public health interventions. They enable both the intervention and the study procedures to be modified and developed over time in a way that parallel-group designs do not facilitate. This results in greater learning about what is feasible and gathering of information on contextual factors including the size of individual centres, their function and purpose; their environmental and their cultural constraints
Summary
Contact centres are one of the most sedentary workplaces, with employees spending a very high proportion of their working day sitting down. There have been no previous randomised studies aiming to reduce sedentary behaviour in contact centre staff. Sedentary behaviour is known to contribute to poor health outcomes such as poor mental health, musculoskeletal disorders, diabetes and cardiovascular disease [1,2,3,4,5,6]. These risks are independent of physical activity [7, 8]. As evidenced by a recent review [16], interventions which showed the most promise in reducing sitting time were those that aimed to directly change sedentary behaviour rather than indirectly through increasing physical activity. The reduction of sedentary behaviour is not a consequence of effectively promoting physical activity and should be recognised independently when developing interventions, guidelines and legislation
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