Team Project Summaries from 2004-7

1. Investigating Janitorial Chemical Hazards: "So Safe You Can Eat It"  
2. Overhead Drilling in the Construction Trades
3. Summertime Blues: Heat Stress in a Fabric-coating Factory
4. Heavenly Beds, Backbreaking Work: Hotel Room Cleaners
5. Day Laborers in Los Angeles  Survey of Hazards
6. Bricklayer Exposure to Silica Dust
7. Heat Illness among California Farmworkers
8. Chinese Restaurant Worker Hazards
9. New York Public Employees Federation (PEF) Violence Prevention Project
10. Health and Safety at Work: Immigrant Retail Workers in Brooklyn

 

New York Public Employees Federation (PEF) Violence Prevention Project

Sponsors and Mentors

• New York Public Employees Federation (PEF)
• University of Maryland School of Nursing

OHIP interns assisted PEF in a number of activities related to the five-year participatory action research project to implement and evaluate various violence prevention interventions in social service settings.  In particular, they wanted to evaluate how effective the joint health and safety committees at worksites had been in helping implement a workplace violence prevention program.  The employers and various state agencies cooperated in the project, providing both worksite and employee access.

Much of the work by the interns in 2005 focused on a New York State psychiatric facility. The students conducted in-depth interviews with employees who had been assaulted in order to identify causes for these assaults as well as recommend preventive measures.  These concerns included communications issues, training/experience, staffing, post-assault support, and individual patient triggers.  Recommendations for dealing with these themes included developing a unit-specific assault prevention teams, better use of safety personnel and emergency signaling systems, and implementing safer transportation procedures.  

In 2005, a graduate student in Occupational Health Nursing from the University of Washington worked with an undergraduate student in Community Health Sciences from Los Angeles State University. In 2007, a doctoral student in Occupational Health Nursing from University of Maryland continued work on the project.