Abstract
The foundation of healthy workplace design is an understanding of work practices. Volunteers comprise the majority of the workforce in care centers using horses to address human health issues. Documentation is lacking on protections for worker well-being in equestrian microenvironments which are known to have the potential for dust exposures. Climate acts as a master variable in equestrian facility design and ventilation usage to address dust and temperature concerns. Using climate as an independent variable, our objective was to characterize space usage, safety, environmental control, and organizational practices through a national survey of equine assisted programs. We found that more fully enclosed indoor arena spaces were in cold/very cold and mixed-humid climates (p = 0.0114). Annually more volunteers (p = 0.0073) work in these two climate groups averaging 100 volunteers per location. A total of 34% of all facilities, regardless of climate, do not use mechanical ventilation systems (e.g., fans). As volunteer worker time in the arena increased, time in the barn microenvironment tended to decrease (p = 0.0538). We identified facility designs, ventilation usage, and worker arrangements to refine the scalability of future air contaminant monitoring and to provide frameworks for education, workplace design, and prevention of exposure to dust.
Highlights
In Equine Assisted Services (EAS), hippotherapy (HT) and therapeutic riding (TR)are well documented to aid in social, emotional, and behavioral development [1,2]
The purpose of this study was to: (1) establish baseline space usage, safety, organization, and environmental control practices in EAS programs using volunteer workers to aid in contextualizing future exposure studies (e.g., What happens in the spaces? What organizational or safety practices may contribute to dust exposures?) and (2) determine relationships between space usage, safety, organization, and controls used in EAS and climate designation
This study is the first to establish how volunteer workers interact in equestrian spaces, and how EAS programs offer services related to climate
Summary
In Equine Assisted Services (EAS), hippotherapy (HT) and therapeutic riding (TR)are well documented to aid in social, emotional, and behavioral development [1,2]. The Professional Association of Therapeutic Horsemanship (PATH) International reported that over 61,600 volunteers contributed an estimated value of more than four billion dollars in volunteer hours in 2017 [3]. These workers are essential in offering safe interventions for individuals with special needs and usually work in teams of three volunteers and one horse (volunteer horse unit; VHU; Figure S1). TR is adapted to populations that can have physical, social, or emotional vulnerabilities that the intervention is designed to mitigate [4] Populations served by these health-based activities are predominantly youth aged 6–18 years with over 37,000 participants internationally in 2017 [3]. Emphasis on participant outcomes has overshadowed volunteers’ workplace health and well-being
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