Ex4OSH 2021 Conference

About the Conference

Ex4OSH 2021 conference will bring together an international and interdisciplinary audience of employers, workers, health and safety professionals, researchers, policymakers, and the academic community to address the need for an expanded focus for occupational safety and health (OSH).

This expanded focus has been made more acute by the accelerated pace of change brought about by the global pandemic.

The conference will address three critical areas for the future of OSH: research, training, and policy. The challenges facing OSH will be explored. Recommendations to address these challenges will be developed.

Together, the Southwest Center for Occupational and Environmental Health (SWCOEH) Education and Research Center at UTHealth School of Public Health, the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) and the Conference Planning and Scientific Committee bring you Ex4OSH 2021!

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Speakers

John Howard, MD, MPH, JD, LLM, MBA Director, National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

Laura Punnett, ScD Distinguished University Professor and Co-Director, Center for the Promotion of Health in the New England Workplace University of Massachusetts Lowell

David Weil, PhD, MPH Dean and Professor, Heller School for Social Policy and Management, Brandeis University

View Opening and General Session Speakers

Submit Your Abstract

The world of work is undergoing major changes in the nature of work and employment arrangements, in workforce demographics, and in the types of workplaces. Together with individual health, lifestyle, economic and social factors, these changes can affect both worker well-being and business productivity. Worker well-being is being operationalized by NIOSH through its Total Worker Health® (TWH) initiative. However, focusing on worker well-being as an outcome requires a paradigm shift beyond the prevention of workplace injury and illness or health promotion, involving collaborative organizational leadership, proactive company policies, accountability, training, better engagement of management and employees, following benchmarks over time and identifying opportunities for early corrective or enhancing interventions.

Embracing this paradigm shift requires a more expansive, systems-thinking approach to better integrate traditional OSH, personal and socioeconomic risk factors, both horizontally (broadening the range of factors to examine their impact on health) and vertically (from a short-term perspective to a work life continuum perspective).

This paradigm shift will also change how we conduct OSH research, train the future OSH workforce, and design forward-thinking policies to maximize worker health and well-being. Our conference will bring together an international, interprofessional audience of employers, workers, health and safety professionals, researchers, policymakers, and academic community to address the need for an expanded focus for OSH.  Read more on the Expanded Focus for OSH, and two preparatory workshops (1,2) held in 2020 that informed the agenda of this conference.

Submission deadline is Friday, July 23, 2021, 11:59 CST

We invite you to submit an abstract and look forward to announcing registration soon!

Submit your abstract!

For More Information

Contact the Ex4OSH 2021 conference team at Ex4OSH@uth.tmc.edu

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