Oregon State University receives national designation for worker health

Oregon State has been named a Total Worker Health® Affiliate with the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, a designation that recognizes the broad range of health-related resources already available to employees as well as OSU’s plans to better integrate and promote worker health and safety going forward.

OSU being a TWH affiliate also aligns with OSU’s current efforts to become a Health Promoting Campus, part of an initiative by the international Okanagan Charter for institutions of higher education to embed health into all aspects of campus culture.

“It’s a recognition that we are forward-thinking in this area, and also that work needs to be done,” said Professor Laurel Kincl, associate dean for academic and faculty affairs in the College of Health and one of the leaders of the health and safety group that pursued the TWH designation. “Sometimes you need a catalyst, and I’m hopeful that this is going to start a lot of conversations.” 

OSU joins other higher education institutions like the University of California system in becoming an affiliate. It is the first Oregon university to receive the designation.

The group working on the TWH and Health Promoting University spans the College of Health (Laurel Kincl and Kelly Chandler), OSU Environmental Health and Safety (Dan Kermoyan), OSU Student Health Services (Kelly Hower), OSU Occupational Health Services (Ariel Leshchinsky), OSU University Human Resources (Bonny Ray) and OSU’s workers compensation insurer (SAIF Corporation). 

The affiliation with NIOSH may also provide opportunities for research partnerships and funding with other affiliates or NIOSH itself, and leaders hope the designation will contribute positively to recruitment and retention of students and employees.

To achieve the designation, the OSU group compiled a list of health-related resources offered at OSU. The list includes expected items like mental health supports through Lyra and the Center for Psychological Services, environmental health and safety protocols and Faculty Staff Fitness classes, but also programs for financial health, professional development, social and cultural connection and work-life fit.

The logic for including such a wide range of resources is similar to the concept of social determinants of health, wherein medical providers consider a patient’s socioeconomic status and home life to help pursue the most effective treatment, rather than just treating symptoms in a vacuum.

At OSU, for example, “We want to support employees’ mental health; we know mental health impacts well-being and an employee’s ability to be fully present and working safely. So we have a benefit like Lyra,” said Bonny Ray, executive director for University Human Resources. “But if we aren’t supporting employees in working normal hours, or if they’re having to do multiple jobs long-term, a single supportive benefit is not enough, so our practices and policies matter, too.”

Employees who feel supported in their health and their professional goals are more likely to be present and engaged, working safely and performing their best, Ray said.

The TWH affiliation represents a positive first step toward a culture and language shift at the university, she said, and the task going forward will require leaders across campus to find points of connection between the different types of resources and communicate those to employees.

“We have many things in place to support employees. Now, how do we work together to say, ‘It doesn’t matter if we have safe work practices if we don’t think about the whole picture of employee well-being’?” Ray said. “There is more work to do, and I don’t think it’ll be fast. It’s not like once we got the designation, we became completely integrated. From my perspective, we’re in a planning stage of next steps of what that strategy looks like.”

The comprehensive list of well-being resources OSU offers is an important component to Total Worker Health®, Ray said, and has been built into an Employee Well-Being website where OSU employees can find all the different health resources available to them in one place.

Part of the challenge at a university like OSU is the diversity of worksites spread across multiple campuses, Kincl said. Some OSU employees work at a desk or in a lab; some work in food service, in animal handling, in icy marine waters, in heavy equipment for maintenance or groundskeeping, and many more. All those positions have different safety requirements and afford employees different amounts of time to access health resources, she said.

That’s another reason that health promotion at OSU needs to be a cross-disciplinary effort, Kincl said.

“Not one person has to do it, but a collective of people can think about this more comprehensively and learn from each other, and identify where there are opportunities in each other’s areas,” she said. “I think the barrier is just really getting people to talk about being a health promoting university and what that means for total worker health, and people sharing ideas and then acting on them.”

To learn more about OSU efforts related to health promotion, check out the Beaver Healthy website.