Oregon healthy workforce center: The nexus of safety, health and wellness in total worker health: Marriage or just cohabitation?

Background and Objectives: Worksite health protection and safety programs typically operate independently in the workplace. The NIOSH Total Worker Health (TWH) Centers of Excellence were funded to strategically integrate workplace health protection and promotion in systematic interventions. Our Center application brought interdisciplinary scientists together from sports medicine, health promotion, occupational and experimental psychology, ergonomics, and industrial hygiene. Combining health protection and health promotion was new to our investigators, most of whom had used one but not all elements of TWH in their research. The interdisciplinary team worked to combine elements of TWH in their projects across diverse settings and occupations, including construction, corrections, parks and recreation, and home care.

Methods: To address all topics in TWH, Center investigators committed to using common validated measurement instruments to evaluate longitudinal outcomes and common elements in their intervention methods.

Results: As investigators forged their field interventions, each faced challenges and borrowed methods used by other Center investigators. Some projects began as predominantly health promotion-focused, but engagement with safety professionals incorporated health protection; others were safety-focused but introduced wellness. Cross-project baseline findings and descriptions of collaborative efforts will provide insight into the challenges of achieving synergistic improvements in TWH outcomes in the workplace. Some interventions melded wellness and health and safety together better than others.

Conclusions: The use of common outcome measures, similar intervention methods and collaboration on logistics across diverse settings and occupations shed light on whether safety, health and wellness can be truly married, or are destined to just live together.