In brief
- Total Worker Health (TWH) looks at how job-related factors affect well-being, not only whether work is safe.
- NIOSH funds 10 academic Centers of Excellence for TWH across the U.S.
- The Centers run multidisciplinary research on worker safety, health and well-being.
What Total Worker Health means
Total Worker Health combines every aspect of work into integrated interventions. Traditional occupational safety and health protects workers from harms that come from the work itself. TWH goes further, treating work as a social determinant of health: wages, hours, workload, stress, relationships at work and access to paid leave all shape well-being.
What the Centers do
The Centers are hubs for TWH research and practice. They build the evidence for new answers to complex safety and health problems, offering practical solutions that keep workers safe and healthy and help employers build and keep a productive workforce. Their work spans intervention research, outreach and education, with evaluation to learn what works.
The 10 Total Worker Health Centers. Map: CDC/NIOSH.
The 10 Centers
| Center | Host |
|---|---|
| California Labor Laboratory (CALL Center) | University of California, San Francisco |
| Carolina Center for Healthy Work Design and Worker Well-Being | University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill |
| Center for Health, Work & Environment (CHWE) | Colorado School of Public Health |
| Center for the Promotion of Health in the New England Workplace (CPH-NEW) | University of Connecticut and University of Massachusetts Lowell |
| Healthier Workforce Center of the Midwest (HWC) | University of Iowa, with four universities and three organizations |
| Johns Hopkins POE Total Worker Health® Center (Psychosocial, Organizational, and Environmental) | Johns Hopkins University |
| Oregon Healthy Workforce Center (OHWC) | Oregon Health & Science University, Portland |
| Center for Work, Health, & Wellbeing | Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health |
| Center for Healthy Work | University of Illinois Chicago |
| Utah Center for the Promotion of Work and Employment Research (U-POWER) | University of Utah |
Research priorities
The Centers work across issues relevant to TWH. Current priorities:
- opioid and other substance use disorders at work;
- TWH outreach, education and training;
- measuring worker well-being;
- the future of work, including workplace flexibility;
- healthy work design;
- mental health at work.
Several Centers publish annual reports, among them CALL, Carolina, CPH-NEW, HWC, Oregon, UIC and U-POWER (2024–2025). NIOSH also posts highlights of the Centers' work.
Funding
The Centers are funded by cooperative agreements in five-year cycles: 2016–2021 under PAR-15-361, and 2021–2026 under PAR-20-297.
Sources
Based on "Centers of Excellence for Total Worker Health," National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; a work of the United States government in the public domain. Total Worker Health® is a registered trademark of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Two stock photographs on the page are not reproduced.
Licence: CC0 1.0 (public domain) · Adapted from www.cdc.gov
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