Can occupational health professionals successfully apply the Goldilocks Work Paradigm in a simulated work redesign?

This study aimed to assess occupational health professionals' application of the Goldilocks Work Paradigm in redesigning jobs for healthier physical behaviours while maintaining productivity. During a group simulation exercise, participants (n = 16) created job descriptions for four different occupation cases (factory worker, office worker, teacher, train driver) and then redesigned the jobs using the Paradigm. Substantial changes in the time spent in sitting (9-30%), standing (8-42%), walking (6-14%), and high-intensity (0-24%) physical behaviours were achieved, which if implemented would likely result in enhanced health for workers. Overall, occupational health professionals were able to successfully redesign fictitious jobs aligned with the Goldilocks Work Paradigm. The simulation task used in this study may be useful to train professionals and assist workplaces to understand and implement the Goldilocks Work Paradigm into practice.Practitioner summary: This study assessed whether occupational health professionals could be trained in the Goldilocks Work Paradigm through a job redesign simulation task. Participants were able to redesign jobs to achieve a healthier 'just right' balance of physical behaviours. Simulations may help workplaces understand and implement a Goldilocks Work approach into practice.

Prevalence and patterns of multimorbidity in Australian baby boomers: the Busselton healthy ageing study.

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVE: Chronic medical conditions accumulate within individuals with age. However, knowledge concerning the trends, patterns and determinants of multimorbidity remains limited. This study assessed the prevalence and patterns of multimorbidity using extensive individual phenotyping in a general population of Australian middle-aged adults. METHODS: Participants (n = 5029, 55% female), born between 1946 and 1964 and attending the cross-sectional phase of the Busselton Healthy Ageing Study (BHAS) between 2010 and 2015, were studied. Prevalence of 21 chronic conditions was estimated using clinical measurement, validated instrument scores and/or self-reported doctor-diagnosis. Non-random patterns of multimorbidity were explored using observed/expected (O/E) prevalence ratios and latent class analysis (LCA). Variables associated with numbers of conditions and class of multimorbidity were investigated. RESULTS: The individual prevalence of 21 chronic conditions ranged from 2 to 54% and multimorbidity was common with 73% of the cohort having 2 or more chronic conditions. (mean ± SD 2.75 ± 1.84, median = 2.00, range 0-13). The prevalence of multimorbidity increased with age, obesity, physical inactivity, tobacco smoking and family history of asthma, diabetes, myocardial infarct or cancer. There were 13 pairs and 27 triplets of conditions identified with a prevalence > 1.5% and O/E > 1.5. Of the triplets, arthritis (> 50%), bowel disease (> 33%) and depression-anxiety (> 33%) were observed most commonly. LCA modelling identified 4 statistically and clinically distinct classes of multimorbidity labelled as: 1) "Healthy" (70%) with average of 1.95 conditions; 2) "Respiratory and Atopy" (11%, 3.65 conditions); 3) "Non-cardiometabolic" (14%, 4.77 conditions), and 4) "Cardiometabolic" (5%, 6.32 conditions). Predictors of multimorbidity class membership differed between classes and differed from predictors of number of co-occurring conditions. CONCLUSION: Multimorbidity is common among middle-aged adults from a general population. Some conditions associated with ageing such as arthritis, bowel disease and depression-anxiety co-occur in clinically distinct patterns and at higher prevalence than expected by chance. These findings may inform further studies into shared biological and environmental causes of co-occurring conditions of ageing. Recognition of distinct patterns of multimorbidity may aid in a holistic approach to care management in individuals presenting with multiple chronic conditions, while also guiding health resource allocation in ageing populations.

Identification of the human factors contributing to maintenance failures in a petroleum operation.

OBJECTIVE: This research aimed to identify the most frequently occurring human factors contributing to maintenance-related failures within a petroleum industry organization. Commonality between failures will assist in understanding reliability in maintenance processes, thereby preventing accidents in high-hazard domains. BACKGROUND: Methods exist for understanding the human factors contributing to accidents. Their application in a maintenance context mainly has been advanced in aviation and nuclear power. Maintenance in the petroleum industry provides a different context for investigating the role that human factors play in influencing outcomes. It is therefore worth investigating the contributing human factors to improve our understanding of both human factors in reliability and the factors specific to this domain. METHOD: Detailed analyses were conducted of maintenance-related failures (N = 38) in a petroleum company using structured interviews with maintenance technicians. The interview structure was based on the Human Factor Investigation Tool (HFIT), which in turn was based on Rasmussen's model of human malfunction. RESULTS: A mean of 9.5 factors per incident was identified across the cases investigated.The three most frequent human factors contributing to the maintenance failures were found to be assumption (79% of cases), design and maintenance (71%), and communication (66%). CONCLUSION: HFIT proved to be a useful instrument for identifying the pattern of human factors that recurred most frequently in maintenance-related failures. APPLICATION: The high frequency of failures attributed to assumptions and communication demonstrated the importance of problem-solving abilities and organizational communication in a domain where maintenance personnel have a high degree of autonomy and a wide geographical distribution.