Interdisciplinary Center for Healthy Workplaces

Director's Message

With this message, I hope you are taking some time off to refresh and restore, spend deeply satisfying time with friends and family, and to think about how you can make your life healthier and rewarding in the year to come. This is not a throw-away statement. With the chaos and challenges to our mental health this past year from multiple sources, we need to recover our health and well-being. Do we know what to do? We actually do. At this point in time, we actually have the knowledge from science and evidence-based best practices to make the necessary changes to build toward a better state of worker health, safety, and well-being. It is ready to be harvested and consumed in ways that can move our approaches forward significantly. 

One problem still remains, however, in realizing the promise of this rich basis for change. This knowledge is heavily siloed, lacking awareness of how discipline-specific knowledge can be combined and integrated to form an infrastructure of inter-related guidance that supports systemic change. The key takeaway is, professionals from disciplines who contribute to this knowledge need to work together, cooperatively, collaboratively, and in an integrated way to create systems of health, safety, and well-being support. 

We have left so much on the table. Let this be our year for pulling together, talking to each other, and strategizing in unison, to produce systemic change. It’s time.