Title: OHS Member June Fisher Honored on 70th Birthday
Author:
Section/SPIG: Occupational Health and Safety
Issue Date:
Dorothy Wigmore
E-mail: <dorothyw@mail.web.ca>
Winnipeg, Canada
On Saturday, Nov. 15, 2003, academic researchers, health and safety professionals and activists and union members gathered at the San Francisco General Hospital auditorium. Many attendees were from the local area, but others came across the country for the event, it was so important.
We were there to honor June Fisher on her 70th birthday and to celebrate her many achievements. It was a time for "June Fisher converts" (as a colleague calls herself) to recognize the physician's many contributions to the health and safety of health care workers and transit drivers in particular, and the field of participatory research in general.
Who is June Fisher? It depends on whom you ask. APHA OHS Section members know her as the 1999 Lorin Kerr Award recipient for her many activities, particularly to prevent needle stick injuries and related health effects. Others think of June Fisher as a leading advocate for, and practitioner of, participatory action research (PAR). The qualitative methods -- there are a range, with different histories and politics -- are becoming more common in OHS work, as we found out at the 2003 symposium.
Symposium organizers wanted to continue discussions about using PAR in our work, and to broaden the audiences exposed to the debate. As part of that effort, in the March, 2005 issue of the journal New Solutions, we try to capture some of the proceedings and the issues discussed at the celebration by mixing short notes from former colleagues and co-workers with articles about PAR theory and practices. The authors include Ray Antonio (former president of the San Francisco bus drivers union), Steven Deutsch, Jeff Johnson, Jane Lipscomb, Kate McPhaul, Susan Moir, Jonathan Rosen and Nina Wallerstein, many of them OHS Section members.
Look out for it this upcoming issue, and for New Solutions soon being indexed in Medline (Index Medicus), making these articles and the topic more accessible to more people.