RCT of LifeSkills Workshop on BP in Hypertensive Employees

A number of psychosocial risk factors have been strongly related to a range of health problems (chief among them CVD). Clinical research has shown that behavioral interventions have enormous promise to ameliorate the psychosocial distress, the health-damaging effects and the costs associated with these risk factors. However, few such programs have been implemented in a large-scale way. Corporations are increasingly interested in providing such services for their employees, but they have encountered difficulties in knowing which programs are most effective. Until these programs are developed as products that can be tested and shown to produce consistent benefits, dissemination of these beneficial programs will be hindered. Taken together, these findings make a strong case that the development of a standardized, protocol-driven behavioral intervention package that can be delivered in a wide range of corporate settings presents a remarkable commercial opportunity. The overall goal of this SBIR Fast-Track-funded project is to gain empirical evidence in a RCT that documents the effectiveness of the Williams LifeSkills Workshop (a protocol driven 6-session workshop) in reducing BP, psychosocial risk factors, and promoting positive health outcomes in a cost effective manner in a corporate setting. This empirical support, tested in a setting independent of the program developers and by an experienced research team, will then be used to help market the product in the corporate wellness marketplace. It is hypothesized that participants (employees in an urban medical center) in the LifeSkills intervention will experience greater reductions in blood pressure and improvements in measures of psychosocial well-being than those receiving usual medical care and given educational materials on reducing BP.