NCT05487027

Can Work be Organized to Become More Health Promoting for Employees in Home Care Services?

• Status: Completed
• Phase: N/A
• Study type: Interventional
• Enrollment: 131 (actual)
• Sponsor: Norwegian University of Science and Technology · Academic / Other
• Sex: All
• Age: 18 Years
• Healthy volunteers: Accepted

Summary

This is a two-group, cluster randomized controlled trial designed to assess a health promoting intervention in the home care sector. The intervention aims to evenly distribute the patients requiring high levels of demanding care across all workers on the units, which may lower the working strain and thus the incidence of musculoskeletal pain. The two groups in the study will be a control group and an intervention group. The intervention will last for approximately 4 months.

Detailed description

This is a two-group cluster randomized controlled trial to compare an organizational intervention to control. The home care units will be treated as clusters to avoid contamination within units. Control group: No intervention, their work will continue as usual without any instructions from researchers. Intervention group: The intervention will consist of the operational managers distributing the physically strenuous shifts evenly between the workers in each home care unit. This will be achieved using a tool developed in Microsoft Excel which gives an overview over how much strain we expect each shift to have and gives a score on how well the operational manager distributes the strain between employees. The intervention will last for approximately 4 months, depending on duration of pre and post measurements.

Conditions

• Occupational Exposure
• Musculoskeletal Pain
• Work-related Injury
• Low Back Pain
• Shoulder Pain
• Neck Pain

Interventions

Type	Name	Description
BEHAVIORAL	Goldilocks work principle	Using the Goldilocks work principle we have tried to find the "just right" distribution of physical strain in the home care sector. This is an intervention to test if it possible to distribute the physical strain experienced in the home care sector in a way that may be more health promoting for the workers.

Timeline

• Start date: 2022-08-22
• Primary completion: 2023-05-15
• Completion: 2023-05-15
• First posted: 2022-08-04
• Last updated: 2023-06-06

Locations

11 sites across 1 country: Norway