Preventing Slips in Food Service: Development of Tools for Shoe Selection and Replacement

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Project Summary Slip and fall accidents remain a major cause of injuries in the food service industry. Use of appropriate shoes has emerged as a powerful countermeasure in preventing these events. Although many footwear products are labeled as slip-resistant, coefficient of friction (COF) performance varies across shoes and degrades as shoes become worn. The primary objective of this proposed study is to develop and validate end-user shoe selection and inspection tools for the food service industry. The foundation of the tools will be new COF data that is specific to this industry. Tool development will employ a participatory user-centered design approach to ensure usability and usefulness of the tools. The central hypothesis is that developing and optimizing tools based on shoe-floor friction research and iterative user feedback will lead to effective tools that will be adopted by the industry and, ultimately, prevent slips and falls. Four aims will be completed. Aim 1: Identify flooring, contaminants, and shoes that are relevant to food service workers' slip risk. Relevant flooring, contaminants and shoes will be identified using semi-structured interviews, site visits, and a prioritization survey. The materials identified in this aim will inform materials used in Aim 2. Aim 2: Build a database of friction performance for commonly-worn shoes. Identify generalizable friction testing conditions. COF testing will be performed in the laboratory and workplace on shoes commonly chosen by food industry workers, against the floors and contaminants that are determined to be hazardous. Hypothesis 2.1: Correlations in COF exist across floor-contaminant conditions tested in the lab. Hypothesis 2.2: Correlations in COF exist between lab tests and tests performed in the workplace. Aim 3: Use a participatory approach to develop informational and assessment tools for selecting appropriate high friction shoes and determining when worn shoes should be replaced. An informational tool for selecting shoes (website, app, or guide) and a physical tool for monitoring wear (handheld meter, phone app, or shoe scanner) will be developed using well-established user-centered design (UCD) principles. Aim 4: Quantify effectiveness of the informational and physical tools to improve slip prevention programs. Thirty food service locations will be recruited into groups: 1) placebo intervention, 2) basic intervention (developed tools), 3) enhanced intervention (basic intervention plus supplemental support). Shoe- floor-contaminant COF will be collected from workers' shoes in their workplace. Hypothesis 4.1 (Validation): Employee shoes of organizations receiving the tools will have higher COF than those receiving the placebo intervention. Hypothesis 4.2 (Verification): The COF of shoes in food service environments will be predicted by COF values embedded in the informational and measurements from the physical tools. This research addresses NORA objectives for the Traumatic Injury Cross-sector and for the Services Sector.