It is the Holy Grail for safety officers.

OK, besides Target Zero.

Every safety officer is tasked with having a worksite that encourages health, safety and productivity among workers. Every safety officer feels achievement when every single person on the payroll comes to work as expected every single day and works their full shift and is as productive and efficient – and safe!  – as possible. While this might seem unrealistic if not impossible in some ways, when you look at it from a narrower, day-to-day perspective, you can see that it’s certainly possible.

[Image courtesy of Flickr user Ron Mader via a Creative Commons license]

[Image courtesy of Flickr user Ron Mader via a Creative Commons license]

However, many things in occupational health and safety is siloed and not part of a full contextual picture on a work site, and there might be some opportunities that get missed, and thus some worker health could be compromised even if on paper and in theory you do everything right.

There is a new initiative that looks to break down the silos and barriers and provide better context and a more comprehensive and holistic approach to workplace health and safety, and it’s called Total Worker Health, spearheaded by NIOSH.

Total Worker Health

Total Worker Health, or TWH, is such a big initiative by NIOSH that the organization created an office dedicated to the concept. In an interview, TWH office director L. Casey Chosewood talked about the idea behind TWH as an initiative to encourage companies to use workplace safety and health as an integrated part of a comprehensive business strategy.

Chosewood addressed the growing need to make worker health, not just workplace health, a priority in workplaces and among safety officers. With the way the new economy is nowadays, he said, especially with so many workers working multiple part-time jobs instead of one full-time job, it becomes more imperative for safety officers in companies to make sure that safety and health programs and procedures become portable for the worker to take between jobs and home, since every new place outside of one work site can increase the risk of exposures to various health and safety hazards that a single safety officer can’t control or mitigate.

The challenge is that much of our safety and health  standards are siloed in vary narrow lanes and are often not integrated into the entire context of a worksite, home or other environments, and that can lead to more complex efforts to keep workers safe in every environment. The goal of TWH is to break down the silos and seek a more comprehensive, 30,000-foot view to understand the complexities and conflicts that exist and to bridge research gaps so that these so-called “integrated interventions” will always have a “safety net” under them as workers move through their various environments of work and home.

 

Questions to Ponder

Late last year, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) held a Pathways to Prevention workshop that discussed TWH and the need to develop research that will help the initiative gain traction in the safety community.  What the presenters and panelists in the workshiop determined was that, indeed, much of the safety and health research has been siloed, and there is a greater need in these times for a more comprehensive look at safety for workers and to find better contextual models for developing more realistic procedures, policies and protocols that more adequately fit the new economy.

What came out of the workshop was the determination that several questions needed to be asked and answered as this new field of research – what are called integrated interventions in a contextual environment – starts to take shape over the coming years. The most prominent questions were:

  1. What are the current studies that exist that do assessments of these integrated interventions?
  2. Do we yet know the good and the bad of these interventions?
  3. What are the qualities that go into an effective intervention?
  4. What are the factors that can impact an effective intervention?
  5. Are there evidence gaps, and where are they?

The final report of recommendations that came out of this workshop will be available and published later this year, but there are a host of resources available now – including videocasts, the draft report and an evidence report. There is also information available where you can learn more about TWH and its overarching goals and initiatives.