Online Program

Oral

Founded as Industrial Hygiene Section in 1914, the Occupational Health and Safety (OHS) celebrates its Centennial with this invited session reviewing the progress and continuing challenges to advance health and safety in the workplace. The section was formed during the Progressive Era of reform as public awareness increasingly focused on a broad range of issues across the age spectrum from child labor protection to the excessive dangers of the workplace. The section was created in response to APHA’s recognition of the need to emphasize “industrial hygiene” given the emerging issues of the health consequences of the workplace some four years after the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire, a year after the Department of Labor was created as a cabinet level agency but before the 19th Amendment giving women the right to vote, This session reflects upon the 10 decades of advances, and setbacks, contention, the role of science, the changing fabric of the understanding of the nature of occupational health and disease, and the recurrent struggle for influence and ownership of the public agenda. The session provides an overview of the Section and APHA in the complex and entwined issues of policy, regulation, promotion of safety and prevention let alone amelioration of risk factors with all the attendant consequences of health and economics of labor in the unfolding growth of the nation’s industrialization. The keynote speaker and panel reflect on the occupational health and safety agenda: past, present, and the implications for the future on the threshold of the Section’s second century.

Session Objectives: Describe the background context of events in health, the workplace, and expansion of industrialization that led to the establishment of the Occupational and Health Section (OHS) in 1914. Explain the important factors that provided both an ongoing agenda for OHS but highlight the underlying contention and conflicting currents of the industrial and large scale agricultural economy, the rights of labor, the public health consequences of increasing knowledge of the etiology of occupational risks. Identify aspects of lessons learned that arise from the continued cross currents of regulation, science, and public policy that affect the current and future challenges and needs forming the occupational health and safety agenda

CE Credits: Medical (CME), Health Education (CHES), Nursing (CNE), Public Health (CPH)