Title: OHIP Interns to Present at APHA
Author:
Section/SPIG: Occupational Health and Safety
Issue Date:
Gail Bateson, MS
batesong@pacbell.net
"Worker health and safety is a lot more interesting than I thought," concluded a first year medical student who participated in the second summer of Occupational Health Internship Program (OHIP). "Work is such a big part of life. The internship will definitely have an impact on my clinical practice. I now see that I have to ask patients about their jobs to understand how working conditions affect their health." Another intern agreed, "I didn't come to public health school thinking this would be my focus. A lot more people would be interested in occupational safety and health if they knew more about what it is."
OHIP was established in 2002 by members of the APHA Occupational Safety and Health Section precisely to provide such experiences, to spark the interest of medical, nursing, and public health students in occupational health through field-based projects with unions, worker centers, and joint labor-management programs. Undergraduate students in related fields also participated, and were assigned work on teams with graduate students. Four of the eight summer 2005 interns will present on their projects at the upcoming APHA Annual Meeting on Monday, Dec. 12 from 4:30-6:00 p.m. in Room 103A at the Pennsylvania Convention Center (session #3377).
Presenters will discuss projects with Spanish-speaking workers, including hotel room cleaners in Los Angeles and employees of retail businesses in Brooklyn, N.Y., where lock-ins have been an important safety issue. An evaluation of ergonomic programs at a large U.S. postal facility will be presented, as well as an overview of hazards among New York City hospital employees. Other project summaries available from OHIP cover day laborer centers in Los Angeles, psychiatric hospital employees, silica exposure among bricklayers, and workload and stress issues among restaurant workers in San Francisco's Chinatown.
The OHIP program continues in large part due to core funding from NIOSH through the Association of Occupational and Environmental Clinics and the dedicated work of the three volunteer regional coordinators: David Kotelchuck, CIH, PhD, in New York, Robert Harrison, MD, MPH, in Oakland, and Linda Delp, MPH, in Los Angeles, as well as our academic and worksite project supervisors and advisors: Pyser Edelsack, Matt London, Steve Mooser, Lee Clarke, Pam Tau Lee, Barbara Materna, and other staff at the California Department of Health Services. Additional funding and support was obtained from the California Wellness Foundation, the Kazan Law Foundation, Hunter College, Labor Occupational Health Program, The California Department of Health Services, University of Maryland, Center for Occupational and Environmental Health, and UCLA Labor Occupational Health and Safety Program.
For more information, contact either Gail Bateson, OHIP Program Coordinator, at <batesong@pacbell.net>, or Ingrid Denis at AOEC, <idenis@aoec.org>.