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

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

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.

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.

Inclusion Criteria:

• Home care worker in one of the included home care units in Trondheim municipality.
• More than or equal to 50% working position at the home care unit.

Exclusion Criteria:

• Physically incapable of performing day to day tasks.
• Any illness during the measurement week
• Pregnancy