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NOTE: This document is provided for historical purposes only.
The authors ask you:
Effectively delivering occupational health services for the benefit of workers requires a professional work force of adequate size and with appropriate competencies. Optimizing educational policy and funding priorities should be informed by understanding of the actual activities of occupational health practitioners. The Occupational Medicine Practice project, currently being conducted by UCLA Occupational-Environmental Preventive Medicine, is developing empirical data about the actual activities performed by occupational preventive medicine physicians and about the specific skills/competencies they require. The extensive reliance upon specific worklog diary measurements complement the more traditional questionnaire or expert opinion approaches, which may be subject to several biases. The study utilizes work activity logs, questionnaires, and focus groups. The study endeavors to include a representative sample of physicians providing occupational health service, including those who do not belong to typical occupational medicine organizations. The researchers actively seek collaboration with "end-user groups", who are the recipients of occupational medical services, as well as the participation of physicians providing occupational health services. Methods developed in this study should be applicable to other occupational health disciplines.
Providing workers and workplaces with good occupational health services requires availability and accessibility of an appropriate number of optimally trained professionals. Currently, occupational health services are provided by a diverse group of professionals including physicians. However, despite much "expert opinion", the actual work conducted by physicians in occupational health and the specific skills they use are poorly characterized. Better understanding of the work actually conducted should facilitate defining the specific clinical managerial, and public health competencies for which occupational preventive medicine physician specialists should be trained.
UCLA Occupational-Environmental Preventive Medicine is conducting an empirical study to determine (1) what activities are actually conducted? (2) what skills are utilized regularly? (3) do self identified "occupational physicians" represent a homogeneous group? This poster describes the methodology of the study. The study utilizes work activity logs, questionnaires, and focus groups. The study endeavors to include a representative sample of physicians providing occupational health service, including those who do not belong to typical occupational medicine organizations.
A three-phase approach is utilized, moving from a small convenience sample designed to optimize measurement instruments to a larger more representative national sample. Participants complete a short task descriptive and diary form several times daily during several days of work. The form includes several domains: When (time of performance); Where (site, such as clinical versus workplace); Actors (what other providers are involved); Target (who benefits? Injured worker, healthy worker, employer, etc.); What (nature of activity and, such as treatment versus prevention versus administration); Tools (what is used?); System (organ system affected); Industry Sector.
The study has been initiated and is currently in the first phase-implementing a work coding system applicable to the extremely diverse practices of occupational preventive medicine practitioners. The data collection must balance efficiency with specificity/completeness.
While much has been written about "occupational medicine competencies", the empirical /observational basis for recommendations is limited. As the study progresses, data should permit quantifying activity and skill set requirements as well as serving to validate existing questionnaire based data. The researchers actively seek collaboration with "end-user groups", who are the recipients of occupational medical services. Such collaboration can provide insight into the scope of practice and also help identify the physicians providing occupational health services who do not belong to the "standard" occupational medicine professional organizations.
In the future, better understanding of the activities performed can help optimize curricula designed and processes for evaluation of individual practitioners. Further, these methods may potentially be applicable to other occupational health professional disciplines.
The findings and conclusions in this poster are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily represent the views of the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health. Citations to Web sites external to NIOSH do not constitute NIOSH endorsement of the sponsoring organizations or their programs or products. Furthermore, NIOSH is not responsible for the content of these Web sites.
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