Advance-CTR

Advance-CTR Pilot Projects Program (Cycle 6)

"Describing Occupational Patterns in Rhode Island's Workforce"

The profound segregation of neighborhoods, schools, and workplaces created and enforced by centuries of systemic racism embedded in housing, education, and labor policy is a fundamental cause of the observed racial/ethnic disparities in COVID-19 morbidity and mortality in the United States. As highly infectious variants of SARS-CoV-2 continue to emerge, achieving high vaccine coverage is crucial. However, without explicit efforts focused on achieving high coverage among the 108 million workers whose jobs cannot be performed remotely, the risk of COVID-19 remains highly socially patterned by race, ethnicity, and socioeconomic position.

In line with the Rhode Island Department of Health’s goal to eliminate health disparities, our long-term goal is to understand the extent to which disparities in vulnerability to COVID-19 can be mitigated through workplace-based initiatives. To this end, we will leverage the Rhode Island Executive Office of Health and Human Services Ecosystem to create a dataset linking COVID-19 vaccine records from the Rhode Island Department of Health and employment records from the Rhode Island Department of Labor and Training to calculate the percentage of Rhode Island workers by race and ethnicity across individual employers and industries who have been partially and fully vaccinated against COVID-19. These estimates will be paired with the results of a cross-sectional survey of Rhode Island’s private employers to identify workplace policies and practices that facilitate and impede improvements to vaccine coverage among workers.

While existing interventions implemented in health care settings that provide free, on-site opportunities to receive seasonal influenza vaccines have demonstrated efficacy in improving vaccine uptake, the extent to which these practices can be translated to improve COVID-19 vaccine uptake in non-health care settings is currently unknown. In achieving these aims, this project will lay the foundation for a future cluster randomized trial of a workplace-based intervention to improve vaccine coverage among non-health care workers.

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