The Michigan Disability Prevention Study: Research Highlights

This 3-year collaborative research project was designed to provide empirical evidence to substantiate the impact of various employer policies and practices on the prevention and management of workplace disability. It studied a random sample of 220 Michigan establishments with more than 100 employees from seven different industries who responded to a mail survey in the first half of 1991. The study correlates differences in employer-reported levels of achievement on policy and practice dimensions with performance on disability outcome measures, while controlling for a set of establishment characteristics in a multivariate regression analysis. There are three sets of policy and practice interventions evaluated here. First is safety intervention, that is, the attempt to prevent injuries from happening at all (measured as Safety Diligence, Ergonomic Solutions, and Safety Training). Second is disability management, the set of strategies to minimize the disability consequences of a given injury or disease arising from the workplace (measured as Disability Case Monitoring and Proactive Return-to-Work Program). Third is health promotion, which represents an attempt to intervene directly with individuals to encourage more healthy lifestyles, in the expectation that this will reduce the likelihood of a workplace accident or disease, or reduce the lost worktime resulting from a given injury or disease (measured as Wellness Orientation). In addition, a fourth dimension was included to capture the general environment of the firm and the orientation of its management in areas relevant to the study (measured as People Oriented Culture and Active Safety Leadership). These interventions and the general environment of the firm were scored on this set of eight variables which represent self-rated firm achievement of the policy and practice dimensions. The marginal effect of these interventions is determined by comparing firm performance on the incidence of work-related disability (Los(This abstract was borrowed from another version of this item.)