Innovative training experiences for occupational medicine residents in non-urban and agricultural settings : FINAL PROGRESS REPORT September 30, 2015

Details

• Personal Author:
  Levin, Jeffrey L.
• Corporate Authors:
  National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health ; University of Texas. Health Science Center at Tyler. Department of Occupational Health Sciences
• Description:
  "Despite centuries of recognition of the contribution of workplace factors to human health, disease, injury, disability, and death, occupational medicine remains an obscure specialty within the health care community. Little emphasis is given to educating physicians at both the undergraduate and post-graduate levels concerning occupational history-taking and little focus is placed in clinical encounters on discerning and reducing work-related risk factors. Following passage of the Occupational Safety and Health Act of 1970, there was a rise in the number of accredited residency training programs in occupational medicine, reaching a peak in the mid-90s. Since then, the number of such programs has declined steadily by 35 percent in spite of a recognized shortfall of physicians with formalized training in this area. Remaining programs struggle for funding to sustain their educational efforts. In many specialty areas of medical practice, there is also little attention given to the special needs of non-urban populations. Small employers (e.g., those with fewer than 100 employees) are not unique to rural communities. However, rural communities often lack the infrastructure for developing and sustaining a preventive approach to occupational disease and injury, particularly for specific work sectors such as agriculture and construction where the hired and/or migrant workforce may constitute the majority of employees. Over the past five years, funds from the Training Project Grant (TPG) have helped to support, sustain and increase the number of occupational medicine trained physicians who have broad experience and sufficient competence to enter practice without direct supervision. The TPG has made it possible for 12 resident graduates to receive support through this funding during this cycle. In addition, the grant has allowed the University of Texas Health Science Center (UTHSCT) Occupational Medicine Residency (OMR) Program to include a dimension of training that emphasizes the occupational health needs of the rural workforce with special attention to agriculture. This includes identifying related competencies within the six general competency domains established by the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME) and those outlined in the Preventive Medicine/Occupational Medicine program requirements. Relevant learning activities designed to help the resident gain experience with these competencies and reach target milestones also established by the ACGME are a part of the experience. Such learning activities have included formal didactic training in an Agromedicine conference, multiple worksite walk-through experiences in agriculture, forestry, and fishing operations, and a supervised rotation in a Migrant and Community Health Center setting. Over the past cycle, the TPG has made it possible for UTHSCT to integrate agricultural occupational safety and health into the residency training experience by implementing a multi-faceted training approach that relies upon a multi-disciplinary educational team effort, while also leveraging the strengths of the existent NIOSH supported Agricultural Center (the Southwest Center for Agricultural Health, Injury Prevention, and Education). In addition to the learning activities outlined collaboration with the Building Capacity Project at the Great Plains Center for Agricultural Health (University of Iowa) and with the National Center for Farmworker Health (Buda, Texas), have been important to success of the project. The impact of this effort has been to build capacity in Occupational Medicine, a specialty with a recognized shortfall of physicians. Moreover, training emphasis has been placed on workers in the agriculture, forestry, and fishing industries who are up to 32 times more likely to die on the job than workers in other industries." - NIOSHTIC-2
  
  NIOSHTIC no. 20048016
  
  
• Subjects:
  Agriculture Farmers Occupational Health Safety
• Series:
  Grant Final Reports
• Document Type:
  Text
• Funding:
  CDC/NIOSH Grant Number: 2T01OH009221-04 (July 1, 2007 – June 30, 2015)
• Genre:
  Report
• CIO:
  National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH)
• Topic:
  Workplace Safety & Health
• Location:
  North America
• Pages in Document:
  21 unnumbered pages
• NIOSHTIC Number:
  nn:20048016
• Collection(s):
  National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health
• Main Document Checksum:
  urn:sha-512:29185b8d8cca9c2e93792473028280bc2fc3b165534dee8c9028bad0842a5c8a9b10d6b131b8691e353cd47b71d9e410bc905d244616a1904a685cffea53643f
• Download URL:
  https://stacks.cdc.gov/view/cdc/118452/cdc_118452_DS1.pdf
• File Type:
  [PDF - 823.32 KB ]