Ann Marie Dale, PhD, OTR/L, Assistant Professor, Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis
Dr. Dale worked with a team of front-line grocery store workers using a participatory process to examine their barriers to health and safety and propose feasible workplace interventions that integrate healthy eating, physical activity and improved ergonomics. A process evaluation was used to measure the effectiveness of the team formation and potential benefit of proposed interventions to the workers. The project followed NIOSH’s Total Worker Health™ initiative by integrating health and safety into a combined intervention.
| Results & Dissemination |
Participatory program for designing workplace health interventions
The workplace presents both challenges and opportunities for promoting worker health. Employee wellness programs are common, but their focus is often on the personal behaviors of workers that occur outside of the workplace and fail to recognize the workplace as a contributing factor in employee health. These programs are usually developed at the corporate level with little input from workers, resulting in poor worker participation and effectiveness. Ann Marie Dale, PhD from Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, received a pilot grant from the Healthier Workforce Center at the University of Iowa to test a participatory health promotion program in a retail work setting. The goal of the program was to form an advisory team of retail workers who could identify a safety and health issues at their store and to develop feasible workplace interventions to address the issues. Six retail workers participated in a worker Health Team to design an intervention from brainstorming to design process and relied on survey and focus group data form earlier formative evaluation work that identified workplace barriers and facilitators to employee health. Information was presented to the Health Team using an experience map to tell the story of “a day in the life of a retail worker”; the map provided a visual graphic, displaying a variety of information about work activities and thoughts and mood states over the work day and health data of the workforce. Throughout the design process, the Health Team and facilitator met one hour each week for eight weeks. Their interventions focused on improving store communication and educated employees on general health topics including healthy eating. The intervention activities developed by the Health Team are currently being evaluated by store management.