A Multidisciplinary Evaluation on the Effects of an Exercise Intervention on Markers of Health, Wellbeing and Performance in Law Enforcement Workers

Randomisation Participants will be stratified by shift pattern and by role, and will be randomised to one of three intervention arms using permuted blocks of 3 and 6.

Self-reported information After the consent forms and PAR-Q have been signed, an Operational Police Stress Questionnaire (PSQ-Op), Impact of Events Scale (IES-R), a Leeds Sleep Evaluation (LSE) and an overall health and injury questionnaire (Nordic scale) will be sent to the officers via email using Gorilla software in December 2019.

Participants will be interviewed on the quality of their dietary intake. Trained nutrition research students will collect responses to a Food Frequency Questionnaire (FFQ) in a face to face interview.

Wearables Participants will be given wearable devices to measure their levels of physical activity during an 8-day period (full on and off shift cycle) before the intervention: the heart rate of each participant will be monitored via a Polar heart rate monitor and movement will be measured via an accelerometer worn on the non-dominant wrist (Actigraph, Pensacola, USA). Levels of physical activity, quality of sleep and heart rate variability will be processed as anonymised data on a computer. Participants will be asked to log the quality of their sleep every time they wake up from a long sleep via a Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index (PSQI). No individuals other than the researchers will have access to the data from the wearable devices. The data will be downloaded from the device and stored in a password-protected file, on an encrypted, password-protected UCL computer in a locked cabinet. After downloading the data to the computer, the wearable device will be formatted.

Oral tests Participant oral health will be assessed on site at the respective stations in January. Oral inflammation has been shown to affect systemic health with cross-sectional evidence suggesting a negative effect on physical activity in Brazilian police. Oral health will be assessed using validated outcome measures routinely employed in both NHS dental practice and research, including: the visual assessment of inflammation of the gum edge and measurement of the depth of the gum pocket (mm) following gentle probing with a calibrated blunt probe; and tooth decay screening assessed through standard clinical methods. Together, these assessments take approximately 15 minutes.