Every year, 6 million Americans suffer an injury or illness on the job, and one-third of them lose work time because of it. Worker's compensation benefits cost companies $41.7 billion per year, and agriculture is one of the most dangerous industry sectors. To prevent such injuries, US corporations spend between $55 and $60 billion per year to provide almost 2 billion hours of training to an estimated 60 million employees, a significant portion of which is directed to employee safety and health. Training is the essential base for teaching workers to work safely and adopt safe work practices, and supervisor training to provide positive feedback reinforces the appropriate work practices (behaviors). This application is proposed by a University based research team and a community-based health clinic (iSalud! of Tuality HealthCare Foundation) serving the Hispanic population working in agriculture, especially vineyards. Building on work in a nursery that produced computer-based training for a Hispanic population with 0-16 years of education, this project will test the hypothesis that: effective and cost-efficient computer-based training coupled with supervisor feedback and contingent reinforcement can produce safe and healthful work practices in Hispanic workers with limited education and no computer experience, and maintain those work practices for a year. The intervention will be introduced in three vineyards but lagged in time to provide an experimental design that controls for history, maturation and sequence effects. Success will be measured by changes in (1) knowledge of appropriate (safe) work practices, (2) directly observed workplace behaviors (checklist), (3) objective strain and physiologic effort (heart rate) measures, (4) workers' compensation claims, and (5) by questionnaires and structured interviews (thus measuring all of Kirkpatrick's 4 levels of training evaluation-- reactions, learning, behavior, and results). In addition, we will develop a program to teach Hispanic farmworkers with a range of education to learn from internet-based training, to evaluate the background education and experience needed to support the skills to complete and learn from internet-delivered training. Finally, the community-based organization (iSalud!) will be taught the skills to develop and evaluate the effectiveness of a training program, and then develop, implement and assess the results using science-based principles and publish the findings.
