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Volume 11, Number 3, September 2022

Director’s Buzz

L. CASEY CHOSEWOOD, MD, MPH

As we continue preparing for the 3rd International Symposium to Advance Total Worker Health^®, work never ceases in the field. We are excited to feature some fascinating stories in this quarter’s edition of Total Worker Health (TWH) in Action!

Our TWH Exclusive features an interview discussing the implications of increased overtime and long work hours. As our readers know, NIOSH encourages TWH approaches that value a work-life fit that improves worker well-being. Read below about how policies and practices around long work hours can impact workers’ mental and physical well-being.

Readers will also gain insight into the practical, on-the-ground TWH work in this quarter’s Promising Practice. See below to find out how a position exclusively dedicated to TWH practice is helping an organization make changes to improve well-being while listening to workers.

Further down, you will also find updates from NIOSH and our valued partners. This quarter’s featured TWH Affiliates are the Kentucky Injury Prevention and Research Center and the National Association of Worksite Health Centers. Get to know them through the Q&A!

Finally, don’t miss your chance to register for the symposium by September 30. Sign up for the virtual symposium experience to attend from anywhere! Check out the program and register.

We love hearing from you! For the latest TWH news, research, and events, follow us on Twitter at @NIOSH_TWH, join our NIOSH TWH LinkedIn Group, or send us an email at twh@cdc.gov.

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Total Worker Health Exclusive

A Growing Crisis: Mandatory Overtime and Long Work Hours

Editor’s Note: This article features an interview with Marnie Dobson, PhD, Director of the Healthy Work Campaign, and Marcy Goldstein-Gelb, MS, Co-Executive Director of the National Council for Occupational Safety and Health.

Source: Getty Images

The opinions expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the view of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health.

In workplace settings, fatigue is commonly associated with nonstandard schedules, like night shift work and extended work hours, which can often disrupt or shorten sleep. High levels of fatigue can affect any worker in any occupation or industry with serious consequences for worker safety and health. The TWH approach emphasizes the fundamental role that high-quality work and healthy work design play in safer, healthier workers. This article features a discussion about the impact of overtime and long work hours with Marnie Dobson, PhD, Director of the Healthy Work Campaign, and Marcy Goldstein-Gelb, MS, Co-Executive Director of the National Council for Occupational Safety and Health.

In This Issue

Director’s Buzz

Features

Total Worker Health Exclusive
Promising Practice
Spotlight on Opioids in the Workplace

News

News from NIOSH
NIOSH Centers of Excellence for TWH
News From Affiliates and Partners

Quarterly Updates

New Publications and Resources
Conferences, Webinars, and Trainings

Contributors

L. Casey Chosewood, MD, MPH, Executive Editor

Emily Kirby, Managing Editor

Sarah Mitchell, Associate Editor

Cheryl Hamilton, Copy Editor

Steven Marra, NIOSH Web Developer

Please send your comments and suggestions to us at twh@cdc.gov.

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Marnie: There is a growing body of research documenting the impact of long work hours on increased risks for fatigue, injury, burnout, depression, and cardiovascular diseases. A 2021 peer-reviewed study from the World Health Organization and the International Labor Organization found that people working long hours (55+ hours/week) were at a 35% higher risk of stroke and a 17% higher risk of heart disease than those working 35–40 hours/week. Long working hours led to an estimated 745,194 deaths globally from stroke and heart disease in 2016. In addition, long working hours can lengthen the time workers are exposed to already existing stressors at work, including harmful toxic hazards and psychosocial stressors such as high job demands, low job control, or a hostile work environment. Long work hours can also interfere with nonwork life, increasing work-family conflict and reducing recovery time including reduced sleep time and quality.

Marcy: Many of the workers who come to our local Coalitions for Occupational Safety and Health (COSH) groups report experiencing physical and emotional strain as a result of working long hours. For workers engaged in physical labor, like work involving repetitive motion or standing for long hours, excessive hours (often combined with understaffing and excessive workload) can contribute to physical strain and injuries.

Excessive work hours have an impact on other aspects of workers’ lives. A study by MassCOSH and UMass Lowell found that excessive work resulted in weight gain and obesity due to lack of time to buy, prepare, and eat healthy meals. Excessive workload among workers with high physical demands could also lead to pain or injuries that may even put workers at risk of opioid overdose. A report on opioid-related overdose deaths in Massachusetts examined this issue by industry and occupation.

Marnie: Voluntary and involuntary (mandatory) overtime are additional hours beyond what is agreed upon in a contract. More research is needed to understand the relative impacts of voluntary versus involuntary overtime, although it is clear that long work hours, whether welcomed or not, can heighten work-related risks for health problems. In the case of voluntary overtime, an employee agrees to work extra hours, whereas involuntary or mandated overtime is forced upon an employee. Overtime does not necessarily always mean long work hours. Those working a contracted part-time schedule may volunteer for overtime hours or, in the case of mandatory overtime, are required to.

Aside from long work hours, one study evaluated the impact of voluntary versus involuntary overtime on the health and well-being of full-time Dutch workers. The researchers theorized that having control over schedules and being rewarded for overtime can influence the relationship between overtime and health. Lack of control over work time is associated with work-life conflict, burnout, dissatisfaction, and physical health issues. The study found that involuntary overtime was associated with high fatigue and low satisfaction. Those who did voluntary overtime and were rewarded were more satisfied and less fatigued.

Because of chronic understaffing nurses are often faced with long work hours and mandatory overtime, or “consecutive hours,” which are associated with fatigue, injuries, and patient errors. Nurses’ unions have struggled successfully to ban mandatory overtime or consecutive hours, and pass safe staffing laws, partly due to health and safety concerns for nurses and patients. Currently, 18 states have laws banning mandatory overtime for nurses.

Marnie: While many salaried professional or white-collar workers who are not paid by the hour regularly work long hours, most are not required to be paid overtime and do not have any upper limits on work hours. Many unionized workforces where workers are generally paid by the hour often have provisions for any work over 40 hours/week, which can be paid overtime at time and a half or more. In some sectors, this is a welcome way of earning more money especially if regular paid hours are low or are not a “living wage,” but calling this situation “voluntary” is problematic.

With current staff shortages, employers may be relying on mandatory or “voluntary” overtime to fill gaps. The main concern about mandatory overtime is that workers are required to do it whether they want to or not. This can negatively impact family responsibilities and increase hours beyond what people feel able to cope with. This can be particularly complicated for working parents with childcare and domestic responsibilities, especially if there is not time to make alternative arrangements for those responsibilities.

Marcy: Overtime may be welcome for some workers. But often it’s either forced overtime or necessary for workers to achieve a family sustaining wage, a form of forced overtime. Forced overtime not only has a harmful emotional and physical impact on workers but also inhibits workers’ abilities to care for their families. Pressure to work excessive hours may also make it difficult for workers to take time off when they are sick, and this may put other workers and the public at risk.

Marnie: Many industries, due to preexisting or new staffing pressures resulting from the pandemic, are facing challenges around excess hours and time demands. Many 24-hour public sector jobs such as firefighters, police, corrections, and transportation have relied on overtime to cover shifts for workers who are sick or for unfilled or “open positions.” It is often less expensive for employers to pay overtime than to hire new full-time positions. Also, many private sector jobs in healthcare, construction, manufacturing, and warehouse work also rely on overtime to cover sickness absences, vacations, or higher demand.

Marcy: According to a 2019 Gallup Poll, 52% of full-time workers reported working over 40 hours a week, 39% at least 50 hours a week, and 18% at least 60 hours per week. Yet a Rand study found that 20% of workers were not properly compensated for their overtime work. In fact, according to a 2021 survey by the ADP Research Institute, North Americans workers experienced an average of nine hours per week of unpaid overtime.

Industries and occupations that rely on the lowest wage workers, immigrant workers, and temp and gig workers (who are often nonunionized) can put greater pressure on workers to work excessive hours. And workers in those situations have a greater need to make up for low wages. Because these workers have the fewest options, they tend to be the most dangerous, labor-intensive jobs, such as day labor residential construction, house cleaning, nursing home assistance, farm work, and domestic work.

Marnie: Increasing wages and hiring more staff would minimize forced overtime and long work hours in many sectors. This may require local, state, or federal regulation of long working hours similar to other high-income countries. In those industries that require 12–24 hour shifts, appropriate off-work recovery time should be required.

Marcy: Worker-engaged participatory research is the most effective way to document the impact of mandatory overtime and should include short staffing and excessive workload, which go hand in hand. COSH has a long history of engaging in participatory research by and with those most impacted by these types of conditions. For example, research from the Center for the Promotion of Health in the New England Workplace, a Center of Excellence for TWH, uses this participatory approach to document the impact of sexual harassment.

Marnie: As the Director of the Healthy Work Campaign, we urge employers, unions, and workers to assess their workplaces for these problems. Not only is it in the best interest of the health and safety of employees, but it can affect employers’ bottom lines. Long work hours and mandatory overtime may lead to reduced productivity because of fatigue and burnout, and more turnover, as we are seeing currently in hospitality, healthcare, and education. Along with establishing labor-management health and safety committees and other structures for involving workers in discussions, the online Healthy Work Survey can be used to measure many of these work factors including mandatory overtime, job demands, hours of work, work-family conflict, and health outcomes. Knowing what the problems are is a step toward focusing workers, their labor representatives, and employers on addressing the issues.

Marcy: At COSH, we have found that the most effective way to address excessive workload through overtime or understaffing is to ensure that workers have a strong voice in the workplace, which may include the following:

Make it easier for workers to form a union.
Establish a worker-management health and safety committee, with workers selecting their own members, to provide a space to discuss work-life balance and excessive workload.
Engage the committee in conducting a worker health and safety assessment to uncover hazards and assess workload issues.
Pay workers a family sustaining wage.
Ensure that all workers achieve their right to a lunch break, paid time off to recover from injury or illness, if needed, and keep overtime voluntary.

Participatory approaches are a key tenet of the TWH model for designing safer and healthier jobs. The NIOSH TWH Program has tools to help organizations identify initial steps to improve workforce safety, health, and well-being. Learn more about these topics from the NIOSH Center for Work and Fatigue Research and the NIOSH Healthy Work Design and Well-being Program.

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Promising Practice

Planting the Seeds of a New Comprehensive TWH Program

Editor’s Note: This article features the work of Dr. Christian B. Rathke, DMSc, PA-C, DFAAPA; Director of Total Worker Health in National Environmental Satellite, Data, and Information Service; Captain, United States Public Health Service.

Source: United Launch Alliance.
Retrieved from National Environmental Satellite Data and Information Service.

We hear that your position is dedicated to the TWH approach. Can you tell us more about your role?

The first of May 2022, the National Environmental Satellite, Data, and Information Service (NESDIS) within the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) hired me as the first Director of TWH in the agency. The goal was nothing short of reimagining healthy work and transforming the way work is completed if there is a better way. A healthy workforce is critical in accomplishing our mission and minimizing impacts on U.S. life and property. NESDIS provides secure and timely access to global environmental data and information from satellites and other sources to promote and protect the nation’s security, environment, economy, and quality of life. Our workforce is a multidisciplined and geographically dispersed team comprised of federal employees and a large affiliate workforce.

How does your work incorporate TWH approaches?

The vision of the TWH program is to protect the physical and mental health of the workforce and advance their well-being by creating healthier work. The vision is intentionally broad due to both work-related factors and circumstances beyond the workplace that influence well-being and sustained high performance. To empower outcome driven transformation through top down cultural and policy changes, when workforce data analysis suggests a specific change, I report to and am part of an incredibly supportive executive leadership team. By using my 21 years of experience as a physician assistant, as well as my medical science doctorate and aerospace physiologist training, I have begun analyzing the overall state of healthy work in our population by investigating the influence of physiological and mental human factors in operational environments.

Source: National Environmental Satellite Data and Information Service

How did you get started with this work? Is there anything you can share with us about what you’re working on now?

By incorporating the 15+ years of research by the CDC/NIOSH Centers of Excellence, I am able to create reasonable starting target points for analysis as well as incorporate agency wide surveys, time off and sick leave pay records, and anecdotal input from all-hands presentations and targeted leadership discussions. All the data and analysis will be packaged in an executive paper published sometime this fall. The paper will also include practical system-oriented, organizational-level solutions that will be scalable for broader applications as demands and expectations increase across the workforce.

What have you learned from this research so far?

What is clear from national research is that both the federal and private sectors are facing big challenges such as burnout, exhaustion, hybrid work environments, infectious diseases, and the rapidly changing expectations the workforce has of employers and managers. To help relieve some of the immediate pressure on our workforce, I also give organizational and individual employee level physical and mental health consultations. These provide initial case management, advocacy, and perspective to leadership teams struggling to address present day challenges while managing complex and technical workflow patterns. We are all grappling with societal challenges that are changing the way we work and communicate as individuals and as organizations. Because of the number and size of these challenges, the need for us to work toward solutions together has never been greater. We look forward to continued collaboration with other CDC/NIOSH TWH Affiliates. Learn more about NOAA.

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Spotlight on Opioids in the Workplace

Editor’s note: If you or someone you know needs assistance (in English or Spanish) with mental health concerns or substance use disorders, prevention, and recovery, please contact SAMHSA’s National Helpline at 1-800-662-HELP (4357) or the Lifeline at 988. You can also visit SAMHSA’s Find Help webpage and the Lifeline webpage.

Source: Getty Images

NIOSH-funded grantees and other partners are working to address the opioid crisis. They conducted research and developed resources, including educational materials, trainings, and surveillance data, related to the prevention of opioid misuse and overdose in working populations.

New research and resources intended to help workers, employers, and medical providers are now featured on the Opioids in the Workplace: NIOSH Extramural Research webpage. Examples include research on substance use and misuse, opioid overdose, and suicide prevention for various occupations like construction workers, truck drivers, and veterinarians, as well as for veterans.

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News from NIOSH

Attend the 3rd International Symposium to Advance TWH From Anywhere

Skip the travel and register to virtually attend the 3rd International Symposium to Advance TWH! Registration for in person and virtual attendance is open until September 30. Virtual content will be available on demand for replay viewing after the live window indicated on the agenda. In-person attendees will have access to content from both agendas. Continuing education credits are available. An overview and full agenda are now available.

New Book Highlights Healthy Workplaces

“Making Healthy Places, Second Edition: Designing and Building for Well-Being, Equity, and Sustainability” provides inspiration, tools, and best practices for people interested in the work of promoting well-being. Published in July 2022, the book includes a chapter by NIOSH authors Jonathan A. Bach, Paul A. Schulte, and L. Casey Chosewood, Director of the Office for TWH. Chapter 13, “Healthy Workplaces,” discusses how workplace design and policies can protect workers and support and promote worker safety, health, and well-being. In the chapter, the authors provide an overview of occupational health and safety concepts, including the history of NIOSH and different types of workplace hazards and control strategies. They describe workplace interventions that can increase worker health on and off the job and promote sustainability, taking a closer look at design features within and around workplace buildings that can sustain and improve health. The chapter addresses important topics like psychosocial workplace health, workplace violence, prevention through design, and work equity, discussing specific worker populations, like migrant and undocumented workers and workers with disabilities.

Recording Available: Climatologic Conditions, Chronic Disease, and Work

A recording of the webinar “Climatologic Conditions, Chronic Disease, and Work: Emerging Evidence and Its Implications” is now available on YouTube. This NIOSH webinar originally given in June 2022 explores the impact and implications of climatologic conditions on chronic health conditions among workers within the context of occupational health and safety.

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News From the NIOSH Centers of Excellence for TWH

The California Labor Laboratory posted recorded sessions from their first annual conference. Watch the sessions on demand to learn more about important topics like shift work, burnout, and worker well-being. The Center will host a fall webinar series on the fourth Wednesday of each month from 12–1 p.m. (PT). Join the first event in the series on September 28, “Past as Prologue: How the History of Occupational Illness and Injury Teaches Us About Where We Are Today.”
The Carolina Center for Healthy Work Design and Worker Well-being is working on a research project entitled “TWH Approach to Reduce Falls and Advance Fall Protection in Firefighters.” They recently released a new webpage for the project featuring a recruiting video. The Center also hosted a visiting scholar on Workplace Health, Professor Maureen Dollard.
The Center for Health, Work & Environment (CHWE) is celebrating 10 years of their TWH program, Health Links™, which has reached over 750 organizations.Health Links started as a group of local consultants training business leaders across Colorado and is now a nationally trusted advisor for a growing network of organizations committed to TWH practice. CHWE launched a Recovery Friendly Workplace initiative and is recruiting business leaders to participate in the Recovery Friendly Peer Learning Series. With input from occupational safety health organizations, labor, and NIOSH, CHWE members are spearheading the launch of the new Society for Total Worker Health. The society will serve as a transdisciplinary community of researchers, educators, professionals, practitioners, students, and others who share a common interest in advancing worker health, safety, and well-being.
The Center for the Promotion of Health in the New England Workplace (CPH-NEW) expanded its flagship Healthy Workplace Participatory Program (HWPP) Toolkit to offer more ways for employers and professionals to use the materials. Does your organization use Lean? Lean is a holistic continuous improvement approach for maximizing value for customers and eliminating waste. If so, you might be interested in visiting the new HWPP Tools for Lean webpage. Continue visiting the HWPP Toolkit webpage as new tools are planned in future to help employers build readiness for implementing a TWH program.
The Center for Work, Health, & Well-being will welcome visiting researchers in September:
- Emma Cedstrand is a licensed psychologist and PhD student at the Institute of Environmental Medicine at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden
- Ann Sophie Lauterbach, MSc, is a second year PhD student at the Graduate School for Behavioral and Social Sciences, Future of Work Lab, at the University of Konstanz in Germany
- Connect with Center researchers virtually or in person at the 3rd International Symposium to Advance TWH. Listen as Center researchers present on work organization, mental health of construction workers, accelerating research to practice, and more.

The Healthier Workforce Center of the Midwest (HWC) released the following new communication materials:
- A new video summarizing the Center’s research projects and outreach and education programs.
- A new podcast titled “Successful Safety Culture at Parker Hannifin” highlights the promising practices of the Nebraska-based organization, recently recognized with the Peak Level Nebraska Safety Council Award for their accomplishments.
- A report Starting a Prevention Program for Opioid Abuse in Construction, now available on their website, to help organizations develop a workplace program addressing opioid and substance abuse.
The Johns Hopkins Psychosocial, Organizational, and Environmental Total Worker Health^® Center in Mental Health (POE Center) will host the Mental Health in the Workplace Fall Summit October 6–7 in collaboration with the Johns Hopkins Education and Research Center. In early August, the advisory committee for the Carolyn C. Mattingly Award for Mental Health in the Workplace met and identified winners to be announced in an award ceremony this November in Bethesda, Maryland. The award is given to organizations exhibiting a robust approach that supports employee mental health and well-being.
The Oregon Healthy Workforce Center’s (OHWC) welcomes a new Outreach Director, Erin Flynn. Erin will lead the Oregon Institute of Occupational Health Sciences outreach team’s continuing and evolving efforts toward increasing the public health impact of our worker safety, health, and well-being research. OHWC’s latest podcast episode, “Brain Cleansing Technology: Better Sleep For A Better Tomorrow?,” discusses a new study funded by the U.S. Department of Defense to test a headband designed to enhance sleep. In case you missed it, you can now access recordings from the OHWC Occupational Health Psychology Summer Institute.
The University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) Center for Healthy Work’sGreater Lawndale Healthy Work (GLHW) project is piloting the Greater Lawndale Loteria with stakeholders such as youth, community leaders, and workers. Great Lawndale Loteria is an evidence-informed, historically grounded, and worker justice themed educational game. UIC also plans to pilot the game with small business owners and policy advocates. Other GLHW Project efforts include identifying individuals to join the council—a group of community-academic stakeholders who identify, develop, implement, and build on community interventions that promote healthy work in Greater Lawndale.
The Utah Center for Promotion of Work Equity Research (U-POWER) is sharing TWH-relevant issues and research through a social media campaign called “Elements of TWH.” Check out the campaign’s progress on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn. This campaign is in anticipation of a TWH certificate to be released in March 2023. The certificate is designed to introduce community members to work as social determinants of health, to teach about the fundamentals of TWH, and to explore strategies for change in work health and equity. U-POWER is also developing a primer course on community-based participatory research in collaboration with Research Education at the University of Utah.

These are just a few of the updates from the NIOSH Centers of Excellence for TWH. To learn more about each of the Centers and their response efforts, visit their websites.

News From NIOSH TWH Affiliates and Partners

Featured Affiliates: Get to Know the NIOSH TWH Affiliates

This feature was created to introduce our readers to current NIOSH TWH Affiliates. See how the NIOSH TWH Affiliates responded when we asked about their work.

Kentucky Injury Prevention and Research Center (KIPRC)

KIPRC serves both as an academic injury prevention research center and as Kentucky’s “bona fide agent” for statewide injury prevention and control. KIPRC uses injury prevention research to inform and implement targeted interventions that are evaluated and adopted into local and state injury prevention practice. This rapid translation of research into practice, in turn, informs further research to reduce injury and related death and disability.

KIPRC incorporates TWH into our injury prevention research and practice. Our Kentucky Occupational Safety and Health Surveillance program includes looking at social and health determinants in our surveillance, as well as our resulting hazard alerts, reports, and interventions. KIPRC coordinates the Kentucky Safety and Prevention Alignment Network (KSPAN), which has maintained objectives around worker safety and health and promoting integration of TWH principles and practices among businesses/organizations statewide.

KIPRC became an affiliate in 2014 because we recognized the importance of overall worker well-being in preventing injury and believed we could enhance our research and interventions by integrating the TWH approach in our efforts.

We are proud of the work done within KSPAN to increase the awareness of TWH across Kentucky.

Being a TWH affiliate has allowed us to learn from others in the TWH network and has helped us to improve the quality of our research and practice by looking at worker health from a more holistic perspective.

National Association of Worksite Health Centers (NAWHC)

NAWHC is a not-for-profit, 501(c)3 membership organization assisting public and private employers, unions, and other sponsors of worksite health programs in getting the greatest return from their onsite, near-site, shared, mobile, and virtual health center. NAWHC also provides opportunities to vendors, suppliers, researchers, and consultants that support and study worksite health facilities and programs to interact with and learn about employers who offer onsite and near-site centers.

NAWHC’s activities include benchmarking surveys, educational programs, networking opportunities, and research into various worksite center issues, service, and topics.

TWH practices are shared via NAWHC’s newsletter, programs, and resource website with those interested in or currently offering worksite health centers. Worksite centers provide easy access to low or no cost occupational, acute, preventive services, primary care, behavioral health, and chronic care services, as well as ancillary services such as pharmacy, dental, vision, physical therapy, chiropractic, and health coaching. Such services increase well-being and help people be more engaged with and manage their conditions and medications and keep people more alert, reducing accidents, injuries, and absenteeism.

NAWHC became a NIOSH TWH Affiliate in 2020, finding value in the multitude of resources and programs that could be utilized by worksite health centers in expanding their effectiveness.

As a TWH Affiliate, NAWHC is able to offer members timely access to CDC-NIOSH recommendations, especially COVID developments and resources, which gives us the opportunity to provide members with key personnel and contacts they wouldn’t have access to.

The CDC-NIOSH and other speakers, webinars, and resources, especially related to the COVID-19 pandemic, have enabled us to demonstrate our value to current and prospective members and enabled members to stay on top of this and other topics to improve the health and well-being of their populations.

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Partner Updates

Chronic Disease Self-Management Programs: Research From the University of Georgia

The Workplace Health Group in the College of Public Health in the University of Georgia published research on translating the Chronic Disease Self-Management Program (CDSMP) to worksites. The paper won an award from the American Journal of Health Promotion. Watch the recording and learn more about the research from an April presentation.

New Reports From the National Safety Council

The National Safety Council (NSC) recently released two new reports:

The Mobility, Technology, and Safety: The Next 20 Years Executive Summary report was commissioned to understand the potential evolution of transportation technologies over the next 20 years and their implications for traffic safety in urban areas.
The Impairment Detection Technology & Workplace Safety report reviews impairment detection technologies, which have the potential to detect impairment from multiple causes.

Stay tuned to the NSC website for another new paper on preventing work-related musculoskeletal disorders.

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New Publications and Resources

From CDC and NIOSH

From Our Partners

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Conferences, Webinars, and Training

September

7 – CHWE will host the webinar “Exploring Ethics and Intentional Hybrid Work” at 12 p.m. (MT). The webinar will focus on the ethical challenges surrounding hybrid work. A panel of experts will discuss the effectiveness of the remote environment along with the advantages, disadvantages, and inequities that exist as workers manage the world of hybrid work.

8–9 – The National Association of Worksite Health Centers 9th Annual Forum will be held in Nashville, Tennessee. The event will have formal and roundtable sessions. Sessions will focus on worksite health center topics like planning and design, operations, staffing and management, and legal and regulatory aspects.

9 – U-POWER researcher Dr. Rachael Jones will present on “The Role of Power in TWH” at the 2022 Professional Development Symposium hosted by the San Diego American Industrial Hygiene Association.

13 – The NSC will host “Countersteer: There Are No Accidents” at 2 p.m. (ET). The series will explore important topics to address roadway safety; this event will feature the book “There Are No Accidents: The Deadly Rise of Injury and Disaster—Who Profits and Who Pays the Price” by Jessie Singer. Register today and find past events.

20 – OHWC’s Leslie Hammer will present “Will New and Emerging Guidance Improve Employer Efforts to Advance Workforce Mental Health?” at the Fall Think Tank during the 2022 HERO Forum.

28 – The California Labor Laboratory will host “Past as Prologue: How the History of Occupational Illness and Injury Teaches Us About Where We Are Today” at 12 p.m. (PT).

30 – Last day to register for the 3rd International Symposium to Advance TWH!

31 – Join CHWE for the webinar “A TWH Approach to the Built Environment and Getting Outdoors at Work” at 11 a.m. (MT). The TWH approach focuses on how the workplace can mitigate threats to worker health and safety and enhance overall health and well-being. The built environment in which we work- at home and at the workplace contributes significantly to our overall sense of well-being. Getting outdoors at work supports individual health and safety.

October

6–7 – Join the POE Center and Johns Hopkins Education and Research Center for the Mental Health in the Workplace Fall Summit. This in-person and virtual regional event will focus on workplace culture, peer support, mental health communication, and burnout, among other topics.

11–14 – The 3rd International Symposium to Advance TWH will be hosted virtually and in-person at the National Institutes of Health Natcher Conference Center in Bethesda, Maryland.

20 – Save the date for a NIOSH webinar “Promoting a Sustainable Work-nonwork Interface,” hosted in honor of National Work and Family Month. The webinar is at 3 p.m. (ET) and free continuing education is available. Stay tuned to the TWH webinar webpage for more information.

27 – CPH-NEW will host the TWH Trends: Expert Webinar Series at 1 p.m. (ET), titled “Implementation Science Approaches for Occupational Safety and Health Research: Implications for Advancing TWH.” NIOSH’s Dr. Rebecca Guerin will share her work and provide examples and insights about opportunities for leveraging implementation science methods, models, strategies, and measures in complex and dynamic workplace settings to increase worker safety, health, and well-being.

November

10 – Save the date for the next event in the TWH webinar series at 3 p.m. (ET). Stay tuned to the TWH webinar webpage for more information.

Find more events on the NIOSH Conferences, Meetings, Webinars, and Events webpage.

Total Worker Health^® is a registered trademark of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). Mention of any company or product does not constitute endorsement by the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In addition, citations to websites external to NIOSH do not constitute NIOSH endorsement of the sponsoring organizations or their programs or products. Furthermore, NIOSH is not responsible for the content of these websites. All web addresses referenced in this document were accessible as of the publication date.

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Total Worker Health in Action: September 2022

Volume 11, Number 3, September 2022

Director’s Buzz

Total Worker Health Exclusive

Promising Practice

Planting the Seeds of a New Comprehensive TWH Program

Spotlight on Opioids in the Workplace

News from NIOSH

News From the NIOSH Centers of Excellence for TWH

News From NIOSH TWH Affiliates and Partners

Featured Affiliates: Get to Know the NIOSH TWH Affiliates

Partner Updates

New Publications and Resources

From CDC and NIOSH

From Our Partners

Conferences, Webinars, and Training