About
A message from our Center Director:
The Oregon Healthy Workforce Center (OHWC) was funded in September 2011 as a NIOSH Total Worker Health Center of Excellence. OHWC faculty and staff come from various backgrounds and expertise in occupational health psychology, industrial organizational psychology, industrial hygiene, physiology, public health, communications, and engineering. Read more about our Center directors, research projects, and about our affiliates below.
Our Mission
The mission of the Oregon Healthy Workforce Center is to improve the well-being of workers through Total Worker Health research, dissemination, outreach, and, education.
Specifically, we design, develop, and evaluate the effectiveness of integrated programs that
jointly address work-specific factors such as hazard reduction and work redesign
along with employee-specific issues like chronic illness prevention and health improvement. We put our mission into action through:
- Effectiveness research
- Dissemination of evidence-based programs
- Active interdisciplinary collaboration with partner organizations on research, outreach, and education
Approach
Each research project:
- Integrates health protection (i.e., occupational safety and health) and employee well-being (health promotion)
- Utilizes a randomized controlled design, considered the gold standard for research
- Produces self-guided, scalable products for adoption within organizations
- Contributes data to a common measures database for cross-project data analysis
Research Projects
Given our commitment to action-oriented research, all of OHWC's projects are interventions focused on improving occupational safety, health, and employee well-being. Each intervention is designed to include proven and novel methods for positive change, and tested with a diverse set of workers across Oregon.- Our previous studies helped address the needs of home health care workers, public workers (Water Bureau and Department of Transportation, Parks and Recreation), construction workers, corrections officers, young workers, and Latino/non-Latino supervisors.
- Projects in our current cycle tackle the Total Worker Health of call center workers and truck drivers.
- Oregon Institute of Occupational Health Sciences, a free-standing Institute at Oregon Health & Science University in Portland, OR, is the home institution for the OHWC.
- Portland State University, Occupational Health Psychology Program
- Labor Education and Research Center (LERC) at the University of Oregon
- University of Washington, Department of Environmental and Occupational Health Sciences
- Johns Hopkins University, School of Nursing (transitioned from Center for Health Research, Kaiser Permanente)
