An Opportune and Relevant Design for Studying the Health Trajectories of Healthcare Workers

We describe the rationale, design, and implementation of baseline enrollment for a longitudinal, observational cohort study of healthcare workers. The importance of workplace as a characteristic of interest in population-based studies has become increasingly apparent over time. Most adults spend a majority of their waking hours living in their workplace environment, which serves as a source of unique as well as shared exposures, stressors, and related determinants of health. A rapidly expanding segment of the working population includes those individuals who work in the fields of healthcare. The healthcare workforce, at large, represents an increasingly diverse subset of the population with broad exposures; some exposures are specific to the workplace and others are common to persons living in the community. Importantly, healthcare workers tend to have general interest and willingness to participate in research, in addition to stable employment and easy access to on-site clinical research assessment locations. Accordingly, from a population of individuals working at a large medical delivery network, we enrolled over 6300 healthcare workers into a cohort study involving survey data collection on medical history, work environment, and family and living situation; this information was linked to participant electronic health record data and collected biospecimens.