Small+Safe+Well: A Longitudinal Study of TWH in Small Business

Workers in small businesses bear a disproportionate burden of occupational fatalities, illnesses, and injuries. The investigators conducted an intervention research project to determine how an intervention at the organizational level modifies business Total Worker Health (TWH) practices, safety climate, and health climate. In turn, the investigators aimed to determine whether organizational TWH adoption impacts individual workers' lifestyle health outcomes. In addition, the investigators also evaluated the use of the RE-AIM public health impact evaluation framework in the small business setting, with the intention of improving generalizability, maintenance, and dissemination of interventions and of guiding future TWH intervention design for both research and practice. The investigators conducted a lagged randomized controlled trial (L-RCT) to determine how different doses of an organizational-level TWH intervention (Health Links vs. Health Links + TWH Leadership Training) resulted in improvement and maintenance of TWH programming and organizational climates for safety and health, in small enterprises, over 36 months. The investigators also evaluated whether it resulted in improvements in workforce lifestyle health risks. In the short and mid-term, the goals and outputs of this project is a greater understanding of the theoretical underpinnings of TWH interventions and a model to test the implementation of the TWH interventions as well as an improvement the ability of TWH researchers and practitioners to apply this knowledge to TWH intervention design, implementation and evaluation to ensure generalizability. The long-term goal of this project is to impact worker safety, health and well-being through the continued use of these principles in small businesses.