NIH’s Pathways 2 Prevention workshop on Total Worker Health® (TWH) was held December 9-10, 2015, in Bethesda, MD at the NIH campus. Gary Gibbons (speaking below), Director of the National Heart Lung and Blood Institute, a co-sponsor, introduced the workshop and the panel (pictured) whose job it was to listen to 2 days of presentations on TWH, and report out a research agenda for TWH, also informed by a literature review created before the workshop prepared for the workshop.
Some 650 people registered to attend the meeting on the NIH campus, though most attended by webinar. The in-person audience is shown below.
The panel was organized around key questions, the first of which was: “1. What studies exist assessing integrated interventions. That was addressed by the Oregon Healthy Workforce’s (OHWC) Director Dr. Kent Anger. He brought main points and an update of the OHWC’s TWH intervention literature review (free download). Also speaking from the OHWC is Dr. Leslie Hammer (pictured below), who described factors that influence the effectiveness of integrated interventions (key question 4), focusing on organizational factors. The other key questions are listed in the P2P TWH workshop agenda. A webcast of the workshop is available now.
The meeting was concluded by Dr. John Howard (below), Director of NIOSH, who outlined the Agencies future direction in TWH. The panel was charged with making their report the following day. NIH will publish their recommended research agenda in Spring. One outcome of the report could be that NIH Institutes could elect to provide funding for TWH research, thus greatly expanding the pool of funding available for TWH intervention research, the primary direction of the OHWC.
