Abstract
Total Worker Health® (TWH) interventions that utilize integrated approaches to advance worker safety, health, and well-being can be challenging to design and implement in practice. This may be especially true for the food service industry, characterized by high levels of injury and turnover. This paper illustrates how we used TWH Implementation Guidelines to develop and implement an organizational intervention to improve pain, injury, and well-being among low-wage food service workers. We used the Guidelines to develop the intervention in two main ways: first, we used the six key characteristics of an integrated approach (leadership commitment; participation; positive working conditions; collaborative strategies; adherence; data-driven change) to create the foundation of the intervention; second, we used the four stages to guide integrated intervention planning. For each stage (engaging collaborators; planning; implementing; evaluating for improvement), the Guidelines provided a flexible and iterative process to plan the intervention to improve safety and ergonomics, work intensity, and job enrichment. This paper provides a real-world example of how the Guidelines can be used to develop a complex TWH intervention for food service workers that is responsive to organizational context and addresses targeted working conditions. Application of the Guidelines is likely transferable to other industries.
Highlights
Ensuring worker safety, health, and well-being is critical for employees and employers, since this can directly and indirectly contribute to enterprise outcomes, such as productivity and turnover [1]
Central to Total Worker Health® (TWH) is the idea that integrated interventions and approaches that address policies, programs, and practices within the work environment are critical to modifying the multifaceted and interwoven factors that affect worker safety, health, and well-being [1,3]
This paper aims to contribute to the body of TWH research-to-practice literature of how to develop interventions that address working conditions; it provides transparency around the decision-making processes and methods used to guide the stages of intervention development, as called for by other researchers [11,12]
Summary
Health, and well-being is critical for employees and employers, since this can directly and indirectly contribute to enterprise outcomes, such as productivity and turnover [1]. Total Worker Health® (TWH) as a holistic approach to promoting and protecting worker safety, health, and well-being. TWH is defined as “policies, programs, and practices that integrate protection from work-related safety and health hazards with promotion of injury and illness-prevention efforts to advance worker well-being” [2]. Central to TWH is the idea that integrated interventions and approaches that address policies, programs, and practices within the work environment are critical to modifying the multifaceted and interwoven factors that affect worker safety, health, and well-being [1,3].
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