NIOSH Adds New Centers of Excellence for Total Worker Health

Four new NIOSH Centers of Excellence for Total Worker Health (TWH) are intended to help the agency advance its mission to protect and promote the safety, health, and well-being of U.S. workers as the workforce faces new changes, threats, and opportunities. The new Centers of Excellence, which are located in California, Maryland, North Carolina, and Utah, join six existing centers in Colorado, Connecticut, Illinois, Iowa, Massachusetts, and Oregon—all representing the extramural portfolio of NIOSH-funded research on TWH. NIOSH’s TWH initiative involves policies, programs, and practices that integrate protection from work-related safety and health hazards with promotion of injury and illness prevention efforts to advance worker well-being.

Research at the California Labor Laboratory (CALL) focuses on challenges related to alternative work arrangements, contingent forms of employment, and the link between emergent work conditions and health outcomes. According to NIOSH, CALL’s research places special emphasis on populations that have been economically or socially marginalized. In North Carolina, research at the Carolina Center for Total Worker Health and Well-Being focuses on essential workers and other groups at high risk of negative workplace health and well-being outcomes. Researchers at the Johns Hopkins Psychosocial Organizational, and Environmental Total Worker Health Center in Mental Health—located in Maryland—focus on improving the mental health of workers. And the Utah Center for Promotion of Work Equity “seeks to better understand the role of power in defining work conditions that may create and sustain inequity and ill health among workers and find solutions to address these challenges.”

Further details on NIOSH’s new Centers of Excellence can be found in a news update from the agency along with descriptions of the research being conducted at the existing centers.