SWCOEH faculty co-author article "Expanding the Focus of OSH: Lessons from a Series of Linked Scientific Meetings"
Culminating a three-year cooperative agreement between NIOSH and the Southwest Center for Occupational and Environmental Health (SWCOEH), an important article was published last week by the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health. The article, "Expanding the Focus of Occupational Safety and Health: Lessons from a Series of Linked Scientific Meetings" was co-authored by Paul A. Schulte, George L. Delclos, Sarah A. Felknor, Jessica M. K. Streit, Michelle McDaniel, L. Casey Chosewood, Lee S. Newman, Faiyaz A. Bhojani, Rene Pana-Cryan and Naomi G. Swanson. In 2019, NIOSH initiated a multi-year effort to explore an expanded focus for OSH.
This paper is a report on the outputs of a three-year cooperative agreement between NIOSH and the SWCOEH at The University of Texas School of Public Health, which led to subject matter expert workshops in 2020 and an international conference of global interest groups in 2021. This article traces the background of these meetings and identifies and assesses the lessons learned. It also reviews ten thematic topics that emerged from the meetings: worker health inequalities; training new OSH professionals; future OSH research and practice; tools to measure well-being of workers; psychosocial hazards and adverse mental health effects; skilling, upskilling and improving job quality; socioeconomic influences; climate change; COVID-19 pandemic influences; and strategic foresight. Cross-cutting these themes is the need for systems and transdisciplinary thinking and operationalization of the concept of well-being to prepare the OSH field for the work of the future.
The SWCOEH provides a variety of graduate-level training opportunities for occupational and environmental health professionals through our industrial hygiene, occupational and environmental medicine, occupational epidemiology, and Total Worker Health®.