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There is widespread recognition that the world of work is changing, and agreement is growing that the occupational safety and health (OSH) field must change to contribute to the protection of workers now and in the future. Discourse on the evolution of OSH has been active for many decades, but formalized support of an expanded focus for OSH has greatly increased over the past 20 years. Development of approaches such as the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH)’s Total Worker Health® concept and the World Health Organization (WHO)’s Healthy Workplace Framework are concrete examples of how OSH can incorporate a new focus with a wider view. In 2019, NIOSH initiated a multi-year effort to explore an expanded focus for OSH. This paper is a report on the outputs of a three-year cooperative agreement between NIOSH and The University of Texas School of Public Health, which led to subject matter expert workshops in 2020 and an international conference of global interest groups in 2021. This article traces the background of these meetings and identifies and assesses the lessons learned. It also reviews ten thematic topics that emerged from the meetings: worker health inequalities; training new OSH professionals; future OSH research and practice; tools to measure well-being of workers; psychosocial hazards and adverse mental health effects; skilling, upskilling and improving job quality; socioeconomic influences; climate change; COVID-19 pandemic influences; and strategic foresight. Cross-cutting these themes is the need for systems and transdisciplinary thinking and operationalization of the concept of well-being to prepare the OSH field for the work of the future.

The future of work embodies changes to the workplace, work, and workforce, which require additional occupational safety and health (OSH) stakeholder attention. Examples include workplace developments in organizational design, technological job displacement, and work arrangements; work advances in artificial intelligence, robotics, and technologies; and workforce changes in demographics, economic security, and skills. This paper presents the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health’s Future of Work Initiative; suggests an integrated approach to address worker safety, health, and well-being; introduces priority topics and subtopics that confer a framework for upcoming future of work research directions and resultant practical applications; and discusses preliminary next steps. All future of work issues impact one another. Future of work transformations are contingent upon each of the standalone factors discussed in this paper and their combined effects. Occupational safety and health stakeholders are becoming more aware of the significance and necessity of these factors for the workplace, work, and workforce to flourish, merely survive, or disappear altogether as the future evolves. The future of work offers numerous opportunities, while also presenting critical but not clearly understood difficulties, exposures, and hazards. It is the responsibility of OSH researchers and other partners to understand the implications of future of work scenarios to translate effective interventions into practice for employers safeguarding the safety, health, and well-being of their workers.

It would be useful for researchers, practitioners, and decision-makers to anticipate the hazards that workers will face in the future. The focus of this study is a systematic review of published information to identify and characterize scenarios and hazards in the future of work. Eleven bibliographic databases were systematically searched for papers and reports published from 1999 to 2019 that described future of work scenarios or identified future work-related hazards. To compile a comprehensive collection of views of the future, supplemental and ad hoc searches were also performed. After screening all search records against a set of predetermined criteria, the review yielded 36 references (17 peer-reviewed, 4 gray, and 15 supplemental) containing scenarios. In these, the future of work was described along multiple conceptual axes (e.g. labor market changes, societal values, and manual versus cognitive work). Technology was identified as the primary driver of the future of work in most scenarios, and there were divergent views in the literature as to whether technology will create more or fewer jobs than it displaces. Workforce demographics, globalization, climate change, economic conditions, and urbanization were also mentioned as influential factors. Other important themes included human enhancement, social isolation, loneliness, worker monitoring, advanced manufacturing, hazardous exposures, sustainability, biotechnology, and synthetic biology. Pandemics have not been widely considered in the future of work literature, but the recent COVID-19 pandemic illustrates that was short-sighted. Pandemics may accelerate future of work trends and merit critical consideration in scenario development. Many scenarios described ‘new’ or ‘exacerbated’ psychosocial hazards of work, whereas comparatively fewer discussed physical, chemical, or biological hazards. Various preventive recommendations were identified. In particular, reducing stress associated with precarious work and its requirements of continual skill preparation and training was acknowledged as critical for protecting and promoting the health and well-being of the future workforce. In conclusion, the future of work will be comprised of diverse complex scenarios and a mosaic of old and new hazards. These findings may serve as the basis for considering how to shape the future of work.

Rapid changes to the nature of work have challenged the capacity of existing occupational safety and health (OSH) systems to ensure safe and productive workplaces. An effective response will require an expanded focus that includes new tools for anticipating and preparing for an uncertain future. Researchers at the U.S. National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) have adopted the practice of strategic foresight to structure inquiry into how the future will impact OSH. Rooted in futures studies and strategic management, foresight creates well-researched and informed future scenarios that help organizations better prepare for potential challenges and take advantage of new opportunities. This paper summarizes the inaugural NIOSH strategic foresight project, which sought to promote institutional capacity in applied foresight while exploring the future of OSH research and practice activities. With multidisciplinary teams of subject matter experts at NIOSH, we undertook extensive exploration and information synthesis to inform the development of four alternative future scenarios for OSH. We describe the methods we developed to craft these futures and discuss their implications for OSH, including strategic responses that can serve as the basis for an action-oriented roadmap toward a preferred future.

The future of work continues to undergo profound and fundamental changes in response to shifting social, technological, economic, environmental, and political contexts [...]

This study uses workers’ compensation data to explore the extent, severity, and context of violence-related injuries sustained by classroom (teachers and aides) and other school personnel (e.g., administrators, education support specialists, security, custodial and maintenance workers, food workers) in Ohio’s K-12 urban public schools. The Ohio Bureau of Workers’ Compensation provided access to claims filed by workers from the state’s nine urban school districts from January 01, 2001 to December 31, 2012 (N = 19,508). Injury trends were explored with descriptive statistics and logistic regression analyses. Approximately 25% of all filed claims were violence-related. Overall, violence-related injury rates remained relatively stable from the 2001–2002 to the 2011–2012 academic year. However, the odds of victimization for classroom personnel were 1.84 times the odds of victimization for other school personnel. For both classroom and other school personnel, the most common injuries resulting from violent events included contusions; sprains to the neck, back, and upper or lower extremities, and open wounds. Most violence-related injuries were sustained during direct contact with students displaying escalated or aggressive behavior, or during efforts to de-escalate third-party violence. Implications of using workers’ compensation data to inform workplace violence research and practice are discussed.

Attending to the ever-expanding list of factors impacting work, the workplace, and the workforce will require innovative methods and approaches for occupational safety and health (OSH) research and practice. This paper explores strategic foresight as a tool that can enhance OSH capacity to anticipate, and even shape, the future as it pertains to work. Equal parts science and art, strategic foresight includes the development and analysis of plausible alternative futures as inputs to strategic plans and actions. Here, we review several published foresight approaches and examples of work-related futures scenarios. We also present a working foresight framework tailored for OSH and offer recommendations for next steps to incorporate strategic foresight into research and practice in order to advance worker safety, health, and well-being.

OBJECTIVE There is a need to understand how and to what extent theory is used to inform occupational health psychology (OHP) interventions. This study examines the utility of Michie and Prestwich1 theory coding scheme (TCS) to examine the theoretical base of OHP interventions. METHODS We applied the TCS to a systematically derived sample of 27 papers that reported evaluation data for work-related interventions seeking to improve employee sleep quantity or quality. RESULTS Results indicated that the original TCS was largely applicable to OHP sleep interventions. After several minor modifications to its evaluative criteria, the TCS successfully accommodates a range of OHP intervention designs. CONCLUSIONS The revised TCS for OHP interventions allows for a more detailed understanding of the role and use of theory in OHP interventions and may prove to be a valuable tool for OHP researchers and practitioners.

Growth of the information economy and globalization of labor markets will be marked by exponential growth in emerging technologies that will cause considerable disruption of the social and economic sectors that drive the global job market. These disruptions will alter the way we work, where we work, and will be further affected by the changing demographic characteristics and level of training of the available workforce. These changes will likely result in scenarios where existing workplace hazards are exacerbated and new hazards with unknown health effects are created. The pace of these changes heralds an urgent need for a proactive approach to understand the potential effects new and emerging workplace hazards will have on worker health, safety, and well-being. As employers increasingly rely on non-standard work arrangements, research is needed to better understand the work organization and employment models that best support decent work and improved worker health, safety, and well-being. This need has been made more acute by the SARS-CoV-2 global pandemic that has resulted in dramatic changes in employment patterns, millions of lost jobs, an erosion of many economic sectors, and widespread disparities which further challenge occupational safety and health (OSH) systems to ensure a healthy and productive workplace. To help identify new research approaches to address OSH challenges in the future, a virtual workshop was organized in June 2020 with leading experts in the fields of OSH, well-being, research methods, mental health, economics, and life-course analysis. A paradigm shift will be needed for OSH research in the future of work that embraces key stakeholders and thinks differently about research that will improve lives of workers and enhance enterprise success. A more transdisciplinary approach to research will be needed that integrates the skills of traditional and non-traditional OSH research disciplines, as well as broader research methods that support the transdisciplinary character of an expanded OSH paradigm. This article provides a summary of the presentations, discussion, and recommendations that will inform the agenda of the Expanded Focus for Occupational Safety and Health (Ex4OSH) International Conference, planned for December 2021.

Rapid and profound changes anticipated in the future of work will have significant implications for the education and training of occupational safety and health (OSH) professionals and the workforce. As the nature of the workplace, work, and the workforce change, the OSH field must expand its focus to include existing and new hazards (some yet unknown), consider how to protect the health and well-being of a diverse workforce, and understand and mitigate the safety implications of new work arrangements. Preparing for these changes is critical to developing proactive systems that can protect workers, prevent injury and illness, and promote worker well-being. An in-person workshop held on February 3–4, 2020 at The University of Texas Health Science Center (UTHealth) School of Public Health in Houston, Texas, USA, examined some of the challenges and opportunities OSH education will face in both academic and industry settings. The onslaught of the COVID-19 global pandemic reached the United States one month after this workshop and greatly accelerated the pace of change. This article summarizes presentations from national experts and thought leaders across the spectrum of OSH and professionals in the fields of strategic foresight, systems thinking, and industry, and provides recommendations for the field.

During the past 3 decades numerous studies have documented the high prevalence of patient handling-related musculoskeletal injuries among healthcare workers and evaluated ergonomic interventions using mechanized equipment for lifting and moving patients. A great deal of research-based evidence now demonstrates the effectiveness of ergonomic interventions to reduce injury risk among healthcare workers who handle patients of average weights and sizes. In contrast, there is a lack of evidence-based research that evaluates ergonomic interventions for handling bariatric patients, whose extreme weights and sizes necessitate specialized handling equipment. The obesity epidemic, along with special medical and therapeutic concerns regarding bariatric patients, exacerbates healthcare workers' patient handling demands. The National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health is conducting a new study to evaluate bariatric patient handling hazards and interventions and identify evidence-based best practices for handling this population.

This study used surveys from 677 home healthcare aides and nurses to explore factors associated with assaults by patients. Among respondents, 4.6% reported one or more patient assaults (being hit, kicked, pinched, shoved, or bitten) during the past year. Logistic regression analysis examined associations between several potential risk factors and assaults. Three factors were significant, including having one or more patients with dementia (OR = 4.31, 95% CI 1.47-12.67), routinely handling patients (OR = 8.48, 95% CI 1.89-37.94), and perceiving threats of violence by others in and around patients' homes (OR = 4.45, 95% CI 1.75-11.32). Assaults were not significantly associated with worker age, gender, race, job title, hours of work, or use of needles during patient care. Assaulted workers and workers who perceived threats of violence by others were significantly more likely to have shortened home care visits. More detailed research is needed to confirm these results and evaluate methods to reduce assault risk.