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APHA Scientific Session and Event Listing

Sherry L. Baron, MD MPH, Industrywide Studies Branch, National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, 4676 Columbia Parkway R-13, Cincinnati, OH 45226, 513 458-7159, sbaron@cdc.gov

Immigrant workers constitute a significant proportion of the US workforce. In 2005, 14% of US workers were foreign-born of whom approximately 6.3 million were undocumented. The development of successful occupational safety and health surveillance and intervention programs for these workers must address issues of language, literacy, and culture as well as political and economic vulnerabilities and the more transient nature of many foreign born workers' employment. In order, to address these challenges, the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health in collaboration with the National Institute for Environmental Health Sciences funded an RFA entitled Environmental Justice: Partnerships for Communication. This grant program is designed to develop new modes of communication and to ensure that the community actively participates with researchers and health care providers in developing responses and setting priorities for intervention strategies. Projects are committed to enhancing minority participation in research studies and to facilitating communication among researchers, community health care providers and community members. All of the 10 funded occupational safety and health projects use a community-based participatory research approach. This session will present the lessons learned from several of these projects with particular emphasis on issues of how to build productive partnerships between the community and researchers specifically examining questions of how to structure community/researcher partnership, how to effectively communicate with community members and how to evaluate the success and efficacy of the partnership. Presenters will include perspectives both from the researchers as well as the community partners.

Learning Objectives: At the end of this session the participant will be able to

• recognize major safety and health concerns of low income immigrant workers
• Identify major intervention strategies for identifying and addressing these health concerns
• Understand how to sucessfully include community members in the design and implementation of these intervention programs

Keywords: Environmental Justice, Occupational Health Programs

Presenting author's disclosure statement:

Any relevant financial relationships? No