NIOSH NORA 2011 Symposium Highlights
From the Director’s Desk, John Howard, M.D., August eNews 2011—
Highlights From the NORA 2011 Symposium: Achieving Impact Through Research and Partnerships
In July, the National Occupational Research Agenda (NORA) community hosted a symposium on achieving impact through research and partnerships. Over 200 partners and stakeholders attended the symposium, which was sponsored by NIOSH and the University of Cincinnati and also recognized 15 years of NORA.
The symposium agenda was strategically designed to allow researchers and partners to quickly and effectively share their stories about their research, innovation, and partnerships for research and outreach. One of the pleasures in participating in a NORA symposium is the opportunity to see, first-hand, the passion that the NORA community brings to its mission of advancing and using new research to prevent work-related injuries, illnesses, and deaths.
The symposium featured two key note speakers; Dr. James Dearing from Keiser Permanente and Jordan Barab, U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary of Labor for Occupational Safety and Health. Dr. Dearing’s keynote congratulated the NORA sector-based approach for bringing those together who could accomplish diffusion of research results and challenged all researchers to learn and apply the many additional lessons he outlined from the field of Diffusion of Innovations. Mr. Barab spoke of the realities of the current systems for regulation, enforcement, and compliance assistance and emphasized the necessity for new research results to point the way toward future improvements in occupational safety and health.
The annual NORA Awards were presented during the symposium and celebrated accomplishments of University of Washington researchers in effective training in hearing loss prevention devices, and of researchers of The Northeast Center for Agricultural and Occupational Health in leveraging resources to reduce deaths and injuries due to farm tractor rollovers (http://www.cdc.gov/niosh/nora/symp11/award11.html). Additionally updates of 2008 NORA Award winning projects (http://www.cdc.gov/niosh/nora/symp08/award08.html) reminded us of their successes and inspired us by their accomplishments in research and outreach, and by their determination and ingenuity in addressing the constraints often inherent in real workplaces.
In a special session on impact, Barbara Braun of the Joint Commission and Vern Anderson of NIOSH spoke of the high hopes and sober realities of new developing partnership efforts made possible by the sector-based approach of NORA. Additionally, Janie Gittleman of The Center for Construction Research and Training-CPWR highlighted some of the many research-to-practice accomplishments of their well-established and very successful partnership with NIOSH and many others.
Another special session focused on partnerships. Max Lum, former NIOSH Associate Director for Health Communication, described the many facets of r2p. Additionally three researchers described the innovative and unique opportunities they have developed from their university base to successfully impact workers’ lives: Carol Rice, University of Cincinnati; Margaret Quinn, University of Massachusetts at Lowell; and Pam Tau Lee, University of California Berkeley (retired).
Posters and breakout sessions also encouraged small group discussions of research and partnership opportunities. Finally, a NIOSH-maintained collection of historical industrial hygiene equipment anchored a brief commemoration of the 40th anniversary of NIOSH and OSHA and the 15th anniversary of NORA.
The success of the Symposium propels us to greater effort and accomplishments in the difficult but rewarding work of developing and benefitting from partnerships between researchers, practitioners, employers, and workers for the improved health of workers. The plenary presentations are available to watch online at http://nmr.rampard.com/niosh/20110712/default.html . I invite you to view the presentations. If you are not already a partner under NORA, I encourage you to join us as we advance through the second half of NORA’s second decade.