The Occupational Health and Safety (OHS) Section invites you to submit high quality abstracts on topics related to workers’ health and safety for the 153^rd Annual Meeting of the American Public Health Association in Washington, DC (Nov 2^nd to Nov 5^th 2025).

Preference will be given to abstracts that feature originality; use of innovative research or training approaches; potential impact on policy and worker well-being; reliance on high-quality data; clarity of the written; and potential level of interest to meeting attendees. 

Oral sessions: The 90-minute oral sessions will typically feature four (18-20 minutes each) scientific presentations and a brief period for audience Q&A (approximately 15 minutes). 

Roundtable sessions: The roundtable sessions are 90 minutes long and feature 6-10 speakers who each give a brief overview of their presentation. Each speaker is assigned to a table and participants choose a table to hear a more in-depth presentation from the speaker and engage in conversation.  After about 20 minutes, participants are encouraged to move to a different table to learn about the work of a different speaker. The process of moving to different tables repeats 3-4 time.

Posters: The poster sessions typically feature 10 presenters grouped by topic. For 60-minutes presenters will stand next to their posters and attendees walk up and ask questions. The OHS Section (and APHA) encourage presenters to use "Better Poster Design" to present their work. In addition, at least one of the sessions will be designated for a poster competition involving students and new researchers.

Students & New Researchers: All students currently enrolled in undergraduate or graduate programs and new researchers (within 2 years of completion of last degree) are especially encouraged to submit abstracts. Also see the notation immediately above about the poster competition.

Instructions for preparing abstracts

Abstracts should be no longer than 300 words. To the extent possible, organize your abstract into four sections: Background and Objective(s), Methods, Results, Conclusion(s). We understand that you may not have results at the time of submission; if not, please include preliminary results or expected outcomes. You do not need to conduct a research study to share your efforts to protect workers from injuries and illnesses. If your abstract does not neatly fit into the four sections, include relevant facts about the occupational health and safety problem, the strategies of your work, the impact on your population, and implications for other groups and/or policy.  

Members of the OHS Section will conduct blinded reviews of the abstracts.The reviewers will focus on the following, please use this as a guide in developing your abstracts.

• Outline with relevant facts the need for change to protect workers’ health and safety
• Highlight clearly the research, policy analysis, or other OHS activity
• Describe what novel actions and/or research methodology has been taken (e.g. policy making, policies, regulations, unionization, etc.) and describe impact on the well-being of workers
• Address the policy or practical implications of the research or program on workers
• Detail a particularly urgent OHS topic or one related to the conference theme
• Reflect on how the research/intervention/program supports the requirements that employers bear the responsibility for providing safe and healthful workplaces

The OHS Section strives to provide CE credits for EVERY session in our program. In order to do so, each abstract must include each of the following:

(1) At least one learning outcome, which must include one of the following action words: explain, demonstrate, analyze, formulate, discuss, compare, differentiate, describe, name, assess, evaluate, identify, design, define, or list.

(2)  No mention of any trade and/or commercial products.

(3) A signed Conflict of Interest form with a relevant qualification statement. 

(4) Your qualifications statement should list your unique expertise to present the information identified in your abstract. Note: Examples of acceptable qualifications statement would be: “I have conducted research on the ABC topic for 5 years, and was the co-PI on this project,” or “I conducted the data analysis on this project.” “I am a professor at XYZ university” is not deemed an acceptable qualifications statement by the CE accrediting organizations. 

You will be notified in June 2025 if your session abstract is accepted or rejected. Due to the large number of abstracts we receive, and limited time slots available for presentations, preference will be given to speakers who designate “Occupational Health & Safety” as one of their APHA Sections.

We present these abstract topics as flexible, your project or program may fit into neither or more than one. Please submit your abstract to the topic that best fits your abstract.

List of example topic areas:

• Building a Healthy Community from the Ground Up!
  All of our sessions encourage individuals who are outside worker health science but have created programs or policies to improve worker health with outcomes that are data based (less sick days) to those that are by feel (workers seem happier). 

  Unions, CEOs, and research are not the only ways that have and can improve workplace safety. How does training from specialists differ from the training we receive from our coworkers; how have community organizations improved the communication and access to information crucial to our daily safety.

• Data in the Workplace
  The Department of Labor collects information on workplace morbidity and mortality and the success of Workers Compensation—but the better masks for nurses, how to improve firefighters response time, and the movements that protect spinal Injuries? Those come from YOU, the workers, the reporters, the investigators. What is the data we don’t know about, what is the important data and information we haven’t thought about.
• Labor History (slavery and child labor) in OHS; past, present and future:
  The Lewis Hine’s photo series of children at work brought mainstream attention to child labor, labor unions brought us the weekend and 40 hour work week; how can we take their journeys to effect change today and prevent them in the future.
• Leave No Worker Behind!
  As a majority of where we spend our waking hours, this session will focus on how improved safety in the workplace protects our health in spending time with our friends and family. From the 40-hour work-week, to preventing pesticides from coming back with farmworkers to the home, presenters will share how work effects the wellbeing and how a happy worker is a healthy worker
• New Research or Practitioners in OHS
  Newer researchers and advocates to the field come with new perspectives, is there an old topic that needs a new angle to solve, or a different perspective we should be focusing on?

  **This topic is all posters and part of our Student Poster Competition; presents must be currently enrolled or completed graduation in the past two years from an undergraduate or graduate program**

• Occupational Health Equity and Disparities
  Women are still paid less than men; Black woman are paid less than white woman; Asian, Pacific Islanders, Native Hawaiians, and foreign-born workers are not included in the research. As occupational safety improves, how are we ensuring everyone is being thought of and protected.
• Worker Health Equity
  Seeing is believing. Many companies talk about how they support parents, care about diversity, push for mental health initiatives. But how does it hold up in the day to day. The idea of health has grown to include mental and spiritual health, how can we improve the understanding of workplace safety to be an integral part of individual health?

Special information for students and community members: The OHS section encourages students and local community members to submit abstracts for our program. The OHS Section offers a limited number of scholarships for students, labor union representatives and community-based organizations. Please see the OHS Section page on the APHA website for scholarship information.  

Full 90-minute sessions: The OHS Section will also accept abstracts that propose a complete session with 4-5 presenters. The organizer of a proposed session must submit a “session abstract.” The title of the abstracts should begin: “Full Session: (title)” In the first sentence of the abstract write, “this is an abstract for a 90-minute session,” and then describe briefly the session objectives. In the "Comments to Organizers" box in the Title step, include the names of each proposed presenter and the title of their presentations.

In addition to the “session abstract,” each proposed speaker must also submit an abstract. They should indicate in the ‘notes’ field of the on-line abstract submission form that their abstract is part of the [proposed title of session] organized by [name of organizer]. It is the session organizer’s responsibility to inform each proposed presenter that, if their abstract is accepted, they will be required to register for the conference, and are also required to be a member of APHA. Slots for 90-minute sessions are very competitive. If the full session proposal is not accepted, we will consider integrating the individual abstracts into other OHS Section sessions.

OHS & APHA 2025:  

The OHS Section is one of the oldest within APHA, advocating for the health, safety and well-being of workers, families, communities and the environment since 1914. This year the OHS Section celebrates 111 years. Every step of the way, OHS professionals including medicine, nursing, industrial hygiene, and safety engineering to epidemiology, toxicology, environmental health, statistics, community and labor organizing, social justice, injury prevention, education, history, law and journalism have been using science to influence and improve action to better and safer work and working conditions.

The OHS Section recognizes the intrinsic link between the work environment and the health and safety of working people, their families, communities, and the environment at large. Presenters should know how science impacts action and how that results in safer workers, safer working conditions, and safer communities for people around the world. This can be accomplished in several ways including: describing how research, policy analysis, or other OHS activity relate to the science of OHS; describing what novel actions and/or research methodology have been taken (e.g. policy making, policies, regulations, unionization, etc.); describe impact on workers’ health and safety; integrating policy or practical implications into research or program implementation.

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Ready?

Program Planner Contact Information:

Katherine Goscilo, MPH
Katherine.goscilo@gmail.com


and

Paula Malibran,
Malibran.080302@gmail.com


and

Celeste Monforton, Dr.PH, MPH
cmonfort@email.gwu.edu