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

Norwegian University of Science and Technology

Status: Completed

Conditions: Musculoskeletal Pain; Shoulder Pain; Occupational Exposure; Work-related Injury; Neck Pain; Low Back Pain

Treatments: Behavioral: Goldilocks work principle

Study type: Interventional

Funder types: Other

Identifiers

NCT05487027

315556

Details and patient eligibility

About

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.

Full 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.

Enrollment: 131 patients

Sex: All

Ages: 18+ years old

Volunteers: Accepts Healthy Volunteers

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

Trial design

Primary purpose: Prevention

Allocation: Randomized

Interventional model: Parallel Assignment

Masking: None (Open label)

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131 participants in 2 patient groups

Control

No Intervention group

Description:

This arm will have no intervention or instructions from researchers. Participants in this arm will perform their work planning as normal.

Intervention

Experimental group

Description:

Introduce a deliberate variation between workers in how much they care for physically strenuous users. Some workers may receive more strenuous work compared to before, some less.

Treatment:

Behavioral: Goldilocks work principle