Supporting Your Mission

BY NICOLE GREESON, AIHA PRESIDENT

This summer I had the pleasure of attending not only the first conference held under the AIHA Connect brand in Columbus but also the 13th annual scientific conference of the International Occupational Hygiene Association (IOHA) in Dublin, Ireland. One trend I noticed at both events was that many attendees, including AIHA members, were surprised to learn about the free resources AIHA provides.

OEHS professionals are a busy group with important responsibilities, and many of us volunteer our personal time for AIHA, so it’s understandable if we don’t have the bandwidth to keep up with everything going on throughout the organization. For this reason, I would like to draw your attention to some of the resources AIHA provides to support you in your mission to protect workers and communities.

COURSEWORK ON STATISTICAL TOOLS The Synergist has had many articles about the free apps and e-tools AIHA offers to make us more effective and efficient in our jobs. What may surprise you is that AIHA also offers nine hours of free coursework that demonstrates how to use these tools. You can take the course at your own pace, working through a series of videos that discuss such topics as the importance of using statistics to improve exposure judgments, rules of thumb for interpreting exposure monitoring data, and Bayesian statistical approaches. More information about the course, including instructions on how to register, is available from AIHA's website. The free tools can also be accessed from the association's website.

AIHA offers several free, age-appropriate resources for stimulating interest in our profession for students as young as middle schoolers all the way up to current college STEM majors. We’ve put together a PowerPoint presentation you can use to explain the benefits of an OEHS career to college students, including salary information and typical job activities. Links to this and other resources, including our IH Heroes comics, IAMIH videos, and the NIOSH Safety Matters training for young workers, are available from AIHA's Outreach Center. I’ve successfully used these materials in presentations to high school students that also featured a show-and-tell with IH equipment.

PRINCIPLES OF GOOD PRACTICE (PGP) Not all OEHS practices are equally effective; some are better than others at protecting workers and their communities. The PGP initiative identifies OEHS practices that are commonly found in high-performing health protection programs. We envision releasing PGP for several topic areas. To download our first PGP document, which identifies PGP for occupational exposure assessment, go to the PGP webpage.

THE BUSINESS CASE FOR OEHS A common observation I heard from attendees at both AIHA Connect and the IOHA conference is that many companies don’t seem to understand the need for industrial hygiene expertise. AIHA provides a free tool that can help you demonstrate the benefits of OEHS interventions using financial metrics that management finds useful, such as net present value, internal rate of return, and return on investment. To download the tool, go to the AIHA website.

A STRONG FOUNDATION Attending AIHA Connect and the IOHA conference back-to-back was a memorable way for me to start my term as AIHA president. Both meetings were invigorating experiences that stimulated a tremendous amount of discussion and generated a lot of positive feedback about AIHA activities. This experience shows that, together, we’ve built a solid foundation for the OEHS profession. I look forward to working with you to make it even stronger.