Student Presentations from the Occupational Health Internship Program (OHIP)

Workers continue to face a myriad of health and safety (H&S) problems, yet the current H&S workforce is aging and the number of new health and safety professionals has slowed to a trickle. It is in this context that the Occupational Health Internship Program (OHIP) provides summer internships to students, placing them in a particular union or community group.

Working in pairs, students address specific H&S concerns raised by workers employed in an underserved or high hazard job. The emphases are: give students the opportunity to interact directly with workers, provide students with a better understanding of the complexity of the work environment, demonstrate the importance and rewarding nature of H&S work and provide useful information to the workers at the end of the project. Over the past six summers, 83 students have worked on 41 separate H&S projects.

A panel of OHIP students will present their projects from summer 2010. Several of the proposed projects likely to be reported include: health problems experienced by nail salon workers, the impact of the Cal/OSHA standard on controlling silica exposures during masonry operations, hazards presented by multi-assaultive patients in a state psychiatric hospital and H&S conditions among workers in the waste and recycling industry.

Each presenter will describe how they involved workers in formulating the project, summarize their findings and describe the final health education product that they provided to their host union / community group.