Center for the Promotion of Health in the New England Workplace

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DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The Center for the Promotion of Health in the New England Workplace (CPH-NEW) is a cooperative initiative by investigators from two major public universities in the New England area, the University of Massachusetts Lowell (UML) and the University of Connecticut (UC), along with the private sector (St. Paul Travelers Insurance Company. Genesis HealthCare Corporation. Liberty Mutual Research Institute for Safety), labor (Massachusetts Nurses Association and the Connecticut Council for Occupational Safety and Health), and state government (Massachusetts and Connecticut Departments of Public Health). The key academic departments are Work Environment at UML and Occupational and Environmental Medicine, Occupational Health Psychology, and Health Promotion at UC. Strengths of CPH-NEW lie in extensive group experience in occupational health and safety (OHS), psychology, and health promotion and education (HPE); technical expertise in survey research and biostatistics; and educational and outreach infrastructure. Cross disciplinary collaboration will rest on both project- and methodology-oriented teams as well as on the investigators strongly established relationships. "Exploratory,-Efficacy, and Effectiveness" research project #1, "Promoting Physical and Mental Health of Caregivers Through Trans-disciplinary Intervention" will be conducted within Genesis HealthCare Corporation, a major East Coast provider of nursing home and assisted living care. A no-lift program in 217 facilities will be paired with two types of health promotion programs to compare worker health outcomes in sites with: 1) workplace intervention only; 2) both workplace intervention and HPE; and 3) workplace intervention plus a participatory health promotion program. Research Project #2, entitled "Health Improvement through Training and Employee Control (HITEC)," involves comparison of traditional HPE/workplace intervention with an experimental program featuring employee control. All sites will be St. Paul Travelers insured, paired on the basis of intervention type. The Education, Translation, Communication and Dissemination" project builds on Heart and Stroke Partnership plans developed by the MA and CT Departments of Health. The Center will develop curriculum and offer training sessions primarily on the relationship between work-related stress and the development of heart disease and stroke. CPE-NEW will greatly advance public health by integrating two core public health areas (OHS and HPE), thus linking primary prevention to the workplace, and the workplace to primary prevention.