Dr. Peter Schnall is the Director of the Healthy Work Campaign, as well as the Founder and Director of the Center for Social Epidemiology (founded 1988). A physician/epidemiologist, Peter has studied the impact of working conditions on the development of hypertension, obesity and burnout among workers for almost 40 years, as well promoting increasing awareness among students, colleagues and the public of the important role psychosocial work stressors play in the development of chronic mental and physical illnesses. Dr. Schnall leads an academic interdisciplinary research team located in Southern California that includes himself, Drs. BongKyoo Choi, Marnie Dobson, Viviola Gomez-Ortiz (Colombia), Arturo Juárez-García (Mexico), Paul Landsbergis, Pouran Faghri (U of Conn) and Ellen Rosskam (Geneva).
The CSE’s main focus is on its Healthy Work Campaign, a public health campaign focused on raising awareness in the U.S. about the health impacts of work stress on working people. The campaign focuses on the positive actions individuals and organizations throughout the U.S. can take to advance #healthywork and focuses on the development of 3 tools for use by companies, unions and workers for diagnosing unhealthy working conditions and providing help in making changes to create healthy work. The first tool, is a workplace survey based on the NIOSH QWL survey to identify stressful working conditions; a second tool involves reviewing the workplace intervention literature and summarizing in case histories the findings that provide evidence for successful organizational level interventions from various industries; and the third tool, a cost-calculator to provide estimates of the economic consequences of unhealthy working conditions including health care costs and lost productivity. A final component of the project involves a social media campaign to educate working people to the risks associated with modern working conditions.
work organization, job stress, job strain, hypertension, cvd, mental health
