Safety & Health Improvement: Enhancing Law Enforcement Departments

Overview

Researchers from Oregon Health \& Science University have developed a science-based, team-centered, scripted peer-taught program for fire fighters improving diet and exercise behavior while reducing injury rates and costs. Those investigators are partnering with local law enforcement agencies in Oregon and SW Washington to adapt, apply and assess this work-based program among a new high risk group to improve the health and safety of law enforcement officers (LEOs). Fire fighters' work structure is a natural fit for a team-centered format, and teammates' social support appeared to partially mediate the intervention's positive outcomes. Although conducive to team formation, LEOs' work lacks the established team structure of fire fighters. This proposal will apply the team-centered intervention to LEOs and in the process, learn more about teams as vehicles of health behavior change, and their relationship with outcomes and other potential mediating variables in a multilevel ecological analytic framework.

Following a 3 month pilot study with four teams, we will enroll 14 precincts and 80 teams (approximately 470 participants) of LEO work groups for a prospective, clustered randomized 2-year assessment of the intervention (40 intervention and 40 testing-only, control-condition teams). Participants will be evaluated at baseline, 12, and 24. Primary study aims are; 1) Implement a randomized controlled efficacy trial of the SHIELD intervention, a peer-led, team-based occupational wellness program, and assess its behavioral and occupational outcomes, 2) Determine relations among variables in the chain from exposure of LEO subjects to specific intervention components to changes in mediating variables to behavior changes and occupational outcomes, and 3) Perform a cost analysis to determine the economic benefit of this LEO worksite health promotion program. The intervention involves a scripted peer-taught interactive curriculum, which is delivered as twelve, one-hour weekly sessions incorporated into a team's usual work time activities, with four follow-up booster sessions after twelve months. The curriculum is designed to build understanding, healthy decision making skills and engender the social support of teammates; its content and scope reflects the core lifestyles activities used with fire fighters, along with adaptations for the needs of LEOs in domains of the team-building, family support and psychological health. Participant assessments include established survey instruments, physiological measures and selected laboratory parameters of outcomes and potential mediating variables at the individual, interpersonal and organizational levels. Intervention delivery and fidelity will be assessed. Multilevel and latent growth modeling and mediation analyses will be used to assess outcomes and the relationships among variables. At proposal completion there will be an evidenced-based, exportable occupational safety and health program for LEOs. Its critical components will be defined, and its benefits clearly determined.