Disseminating an effective intervention from reserach into the real-world to reduce adverse health effects of pesticide exposure among indigenous farmwokers

Indigenous farmworkers from southern states of Mexico have been a significant portion of Oregon’s agricultural labor-intensive work force in the past three decades. For much of this time, their health and safety priorities were ignored, in part because of the mistaken belief that providing training in Spanish was simply good enough.  Over the past 12 years with the support through NIOSH, NIH and NIMHD, this partnership has assisted indigenous farmworkers to help identify their health and safety priorities, and bring the workers' own considerable expertise to the table to create and test solutions to the problem of pesticides exposure.  The partnership with indigenous farmworkers created an effective tool kit consisting of a promotores curriculum and a film in three indigenous languages aside from Spanish.  The training kits are not only culturally and linguistically appropriate, but have proven effective in improving workers' level of knowledge and intent to use the information. In this dissemination phase our multi-disciplinary partnership is establishing routes to help sustain the intervention beyond the life of this Project by creating new partnerships with clinics, labor union, educational sites as well as possibly the industry.   We have assessed and analyzed various sites based on farmworkers’ own recommendation as possible participating organizations. We have tested the training at the sites to determine factors that contribute to adoption, implementation, adaptations and finally sustainability of the intervention tools. This is a unique study with a focus on occupational health and safety taking research into practice, implementation and evaluation of dissemination.