Mission Statement

The Occupational Health Internship Program (OHIP) is committed to recruiting, training, mentoring and inspiring a new generation of occupational safety and health professionals who are dedicated to preventing job injury and disease through a partnership with workers. OHIP is a national program of the Association of Occupational and Environmental Health Clinics (AOEC), a non-profit organization with regional training centers in San Francisco Bay Area, Los Angeles and New York City.

We believe that students of occupational health need direct experience with workers to fully understand the complexity of health and safety issues and problems in the workplace. OHIP offers funding for students to work with union and other non-profit worker organizations. Interdisciplinary teams of students from medicine, nursing, public health and related fields receive training and will collaborate with the sponsoring union/worker group and local occupational health and safety mentors to address occupational health and safety problems

OHIP will play a vital role in shaping the future of occupational health by developing the next generation of leaders in the field. It will give professionals a grounding in the reality of the workplace. At the same time, it will empower workers, strengthening their investigative and technical skills. As a relationship of trust is built between professionals and workers, both will gain a better understanding of the underlying political and economics forces that create health and safety conditions on the job.

Our model is the highly successful program developed by the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers Union (OCAW) in the 1970s and 1980s in collaboration with the Montefiore Medical Center Department of Social Medicine and the Albert Einstein College of Medicine. Several of today's top leaders in occupational health point to their summer internship as the single most important reason they entered this field. These leaders will serve as mentors in our project to the next generation of occupational health professionals.