Participatory design of integrated safety and health interventions in the workplace: a case study using the Intervention Design and Analysis Scorecard (IDEAS) Tool

Total Worker Health™ (TWH) interventions for improved employee safety, health and wellbeing depend on integrated approaches that involve changes to the workplace or work organisation as well as behavioural or lifestyle changes made by workers. Intervention Design and Analysis Scorecard (IDEAS) Tool to engage front-line employees in planning TWH interventions and obtaining needed management support. The IDEAS Tool consists of seven planning steps in a scorecard approach that helps front-line employees systematically examine root causes of health/safety problems/issues and develop intervention alternatives. A comprehensive business case is then developed for each proposed intervention through analysis of costs/benefits, resources and barriers, and scope of impact. A case study is presented in which maintenance technicians at a property management firm used the IDEAS Tool to plan and successfully implement multiple interventions to reduce work overload. A participatory systems taxonomy is used to help explain why such a structured approach to intervention planning is needed to create a sustainable program for the continuous improvement of employee safety, health and wellbeing for TWH.

Maternal posttraumatic stress symptoms and infant emotional reactivity and emotion regulation

The current study examined associations between maternal posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptoms and infant emotional reactivity and emotion regulation during the first year of life in a primarily low-income, urban, ethnic/racial minority sample of 52 mother-infant dyads. Mothers completed questionnaires assessing their own trauma exposure history and current PTSD and depressive symptoms and their infants' temperament when the infants were 6 months old. Dyads participated in the repeated Still-Face Paradigm (SFP-R) when the infants were 6 months old, and infant affective states were coded for each SFP-R episode. Mothers completed questionnaires assessing infant trauma exposure history and infant current emotional and behavioral symptoms when the infants were 13 months old. Maternal PTSD symptoms predicted infants' emotion regulation at 6 months as assessed by (a) infant ability to recover from distress during the SFP-R and (b) maternal report of infant rate of recovery from distress/arousal in daily life. Maternal PTSD symptoms also predicted maternal report of infant externalizing, internalizing, and dysregulation symptoms at 13 months. Maternal PTSD was not associated with measures of infant emotional reactivity. Neither maternal depressive symptoms nor infant direct exposure to trauma accounted for the associations between maternal PTSD symptoms and infant outcomes. These findings suggest that maternal PTSD is associated with offspring emotion regulation difficulties as early as infancy. Such difficulties may contribute to increased risk of mental health problems among children of mothers with PTSD.