Background: Psychosocial hazards in the workplace contribute to mental disorders, cardiovascular diseases, and musculoskeletal ill-health. The Hierarchy of Controls applied to NIOSH Total Worker Health (TWH HOC) aims to mitigate these hazards through effective interventions. This study proposes a revision of the model resulting in a HOC for psychosocial hazards (P-HOC) and explores its application in improving the working environment.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFInt J Environ Res Public Health
June 2022
Background: This study investigates the association between the implementation of new technology in the workplace and the subsequent loss of paid employment among older workers.
Methods: We estimated the prospective risk of loss of paid employment (register-based) from questions on new technology among 10,320 older workers (≥50 years). To investigate potential differences between work types, analyses were stratified by job function: (1) work with symbols (office, administration, analysis, IT), (2) work with people (people, service, care), (3) work in the field of production (processing, producing or moving things).
Int J Environ Res Public Health
February 2022
Occupational safety and health (OSH) in construction work continues to be a problematic issue, and OSH coordinators are a pivotal initiative for improving this in the EU. However, no studies on the impact of (OSH) coordinators in construction exists. This study conceptualizes the (HOC) as a means for visualizing and evaluating the impact of OSH coordinators' work.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFInt J Environ Res Public Health
August 2021
Engaging occupational safety and health (OSH) professionals has scarcely been evaluated as a means for transferring knowledge to practice about physical workload in the construction industry. The aim of this work was to examine how participants used and incorporate research-based knowledge from a three-day training course into practice. Twenty OSH professionals from the Danish construction industry participated in a workshop-training course.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThere is a growing interest in organizational interventions (OI) aiming to increase employees' well-being. An OI involves changes in the way work is designed, organized, and managed. Studies have shown that an OI's positive results are increased if there is a good fit between context and intervention and between participant and intervention.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFObjectives: To evaluate whether safety climate items would be predictive of future physical and mental work ability among blue-collar workers.
Methods: Blue-collar workers (n=3822) from the Danish Work Environment and Health study replied to questions on safety climate, physical and mental work ability, and health in 2012 and 2014. Using multivariate logistic regression, we estimated the association of number of safety climate items (0-5) in 2012 with physical and mental work ability in 2014.
Background: Construction work frequently involves heavy physical work, and a reduction of the physical workload should have high priority. Technological development has made it possible to obtain field measurements with surface electromyography (sEMG), kinematics measured with inertial measurement units (IMUs), and video recordings. However, no studies have used these methods simultaneously to detect situations with excessive physical workload (events) during a working day.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFObjectives The capability of safety climate to predict accidents has been the target of widespread debate in occupational health and safety research. The objective of this prospective cohort study was to employ a shortened five-item safety climate survey to investigate whether safety climate reports in 2012 are predictive for accidents reported within the last 12 months in 2014. Methods In both 2012 and 2014, 3864 blue-collar workers answered the Danish Working Environment and Health Cohort Study.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Within work sociology, several studies have addressed construction workers' practices of masculinity, class, economy, safety risks and production. However, few studies have investigated room for agency in relation to bodily pain or musculoskeletal disorders and even fewer have made a quantitative approach. Accordingly, by means of a questionnaire, we examined the association between construction workers' room for agency and physical exertion, bodily and mental fatigue, and lower back pain.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: We aimed to determine the association between work, health, and lifestyle with regular use of pain medication due to musculoskeletal disorders in the general working population.
Methods: Currently employed wage earners (N = 10,024) replied to questions about health, work, and lifestyle. The odds for regularly using medication for musculoskeletal disorders were modeled using logistic regression controlled for various confounders.
Objective This study aimed to investigate the association between occupational lifting and day-to-day change in low-back pain (LBP) intensity. Methods Each day for three consecutive weeks, 95 full-time workers from 51 Danish supermarkets with frequent occupational lifting replied to daily text messages about LBP intensity (scale 0-10). Supervisors at the supermarkets provided information about daily working hours and load (number of different pallets handled) for each worker during the three weeks.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Previous research has shown that reducing physical workload among workers in the construction industry is complicated. In order to address this issue, we developed a process evaluation in a formative mixed-methods design, drawing on existing knowledge of the potential barriers for implementation.
Objective: We present the design of a mixed-methods process evaluation of the organizational, social, and subjective practices that play roles in the intervention study, integrating technical measurements to detect excessive physical exertion measured with electromyography and accelerometers, video documentation of working tasks, and a 3-phased workshop program.
Piece rate and performance based wage systems are common in the construction industry. Construction workers are known to have an increased risk of pain and musculoskeletal disorders (MSD). In this cross-sectional questionnaire study, we examined the association between wage system and (1) physical exertion, (2) time pressure, (3) pain, and (4) fatigue.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: There is high prevalence of back pain and neck-shoulder pain among blue collar workers in Denmark. Excessive physical exposures such as heavy lifting or working with bended or twisted back are risk factors for back pain among workers in the construction industry. Technical evaluation of awkward postures and kinematics of upper/ lower extremities (accelerometry) during work combined with the level of muscular activity (EMG) and video recordings can improve quantification of physical exposure and thereby can facilitate designing preventive strategies.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFUnlabelled: We investigated how employees prioritised when they scheduled their own shifts and whether priorities depended on age, gender, educational level, cohabitation and health status. We used cross-sectional questionnaire data from the follow-up survey of an intervention study investigating the effect of self-scheduling (n = 317). Intervention group participants were asked about their priorities when scheduling their own shifts succeeded by 17 items covering family/private life, economy, job content, health and sleep.
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