Strategies to enhance productive and healthy environments for the older workforce Research Project Update 2

Working Late is a four year collaborative research project addressing practice and policy issues associated with later life working. The project is funded by the New Dynamics of Ageing (NDA) Programme, which is the largest and most ambitious research programme on ageing ever mounted in the UK. Working Late aims to develop interventions and design solutions to promote health and quality of working life. This project newsletter includes a summary of developments within the project over the past six months.

Work Package 1 User Engagement

Expert Panel July 2009

The expert panel held in July this year was a very successful event, with 14 participants attending. The purpose of this panel was to introduce the project to occupational health experts, organisational representatives and trade union representatives to gain their feedback and inform the research process.

views and feedback will further inform the research project. The two panels introduced the groups to the Working Late project, including the research team and the projects aims. The breakout discussion groups considered our planned health interventions involved in Work Package 3. There were further discussions on the journey to work, which will be incorporated in Work Package 2. The discussions generated rich and varied data which we are currently analysing.

User Engagement Panel September 2009

The user engagement panel held in September proved a further success, with 17 participants attending. The panel introduced the project to a group of older workers from a wide range of industrial sectors. Their

New Staff
We are pleased to introduce a new member of staff, Miss Lois Kerr, a research assistant within the Working Late project. Lois commenced her post at the beginning of September and will be primarily working on Work Package 1. Lois will be organising future user engagement panels, a steering group meeting and a full collaborative research project meeting involving all research partners in 2010. Work Package 2

Work Package 3.1 Occupational health provision in the workplace

Qualitative data collection Following on from our last update, we have now completed a total of 25 interviews. These have included interviews with occupational health professionals, health and safety managers, line managers and trade union representatives. We have also conducted 2 focus groups with occupational health professionals, and 2 focus groups with employees from the utility industry and higher education sector. Quantitative data collection The survey is now live in two organisations and the current response count is over 600. We are still negotiating with other organisations who we hope will distribute the questionnaire to their employees during November. Any organisations interested in taking part in our survey should contact either: Miss Myanna Duncan M.Duncan@lboro.ac.uk or

The Journey to Work

As part of the expert and user panels, two forum discussions have been held so far, during which older workers and employer representatives explored the key influence travelling to work has on employment. During the course of these, a number of case-studies came to light, which have helped to highlight the key issues.

These will inform the next stages of the work, during which a questionnaire will be distributed, in order to gauge the likely scale of the problem, and to identify the factors that most commonly lead older workers to have problems with their journey to work. This will enable us to assess the information, support and technology that would help older workers to adapt their travel to accommodate their changing needs. It will also enable us to explore and describe the relationship between travel decisions and organisational factors.

Mr Aadil Kazi A.Kazi@lboro.ac.uk Work Package 4

Ageing productively through design New Staff

Elaine Williams has been appointed as the Research Associate on WP4 and will be joining the research team at the end of November.