Overview
Keywords: Back injury; home care; personal support worker
Timeline: November 2015 - present
Researchers: Emily King (Principal Investigator, University Health Network/University of Waterloo), Jack Callaghan (University of Waterloo), Dana Kulić (University of Waterloo), Tilak Dutta (University Health Network)
Funder: CRE-MSD
Project type: Seed grant
Partners: Saint Elizabeth Health Care; VHA Home HealthCare
Sector/Workplace type: Healthcare sector
Themes:
Theme
1
Mechanisms
Theme
2
Risk
factors
Background/rationale
Personal Support Workers (PSWs) perform over 70% of paid home care work. However, they do so at substantial personal cost – community-based PSWs are injured more than twice as frequently as the average worker. To reduce their risk of injuries, we must understand which parts of their work contribute most to the development of pain and injury.
Research question/objectives/methods
1. What are the general characteristics, and specifically the variability, of the musculoskeletal exposures faced by community-based PSWs as they provide care in clients’ homes?
2. What minimum set of signals is adequate to estimate MSK exposures?
3. What signals are feasible to collect in a community setting, during PSWs’ regular client care activities?
The work proposed in this grant seeks to demonstrate the feasibility of wearable field recording of home care workers’ occupational exposures to ergonomic risk factors, establish the minimum sensor set required to adequately characterize these exposures, and collect pilot data to understand the general characteristics of community-based PSWs’ musculoskeletal exposures.
Key findings
In progress.
Implications for the prevention of MSD
Through this project, we will: 1) identify a system that makes field-measurement of ergonomic risk factors feasible on a large scale, and 2) collect pilot data to show what client care activities contribute most to PSWs’ risk of injury to focus future larger-scale projects.
Knowledge dissemination
Findings from this work will be shared directly with our workplace partners to inform the collaborative development of interventions to make community-based PSW work safer. This seed grant will help the research team to build and strengthen relationships with the research teams, management, PSWs, and health and safety departments at both partner organizations to facilitate the free flow of information and ideas related to PSWs’ safety at work.