Introduction to the 2020 OHS Awards and Skit Oct 26 APHA

Each year the Occupational Health and Safety (OHS) Section of the American Public Health Association (APHA) celebrates the past year’s work at an awards luncheon at the APHA annual meeting. The Section honors with awards highly deserving individuals and organizations and enjoys the performance of a skit highlighting issues from the past year. In 2020, this celebration was done remotely, as was the APHA annual meeting, because of the coronavirus pandemic. The OHS Section is one of the oldest within APHA, advocating for the health, safety and wellbeing of workers, families, communities, and the environment since 1914. The OHS Section has more than 700 members. While many in the OHS Section self-identify as "OHS Professionals," we represent and recruit members from a multitude of disciplines that influence and improve work and working conditions from medicine, nursing, industrial hygiene, and safety engineering to epidemiology, toxicology, environmental health, statistics, community and labor organizing, social justice, injury prevention, education, history, law and journalism. The OHS Section recognizes the intrinsic link between the work environment and the health and safety of working people, their families, communities, and the environment at large. Over 145 million workers in the U.S. - and several billion people around the globe - face the risk of work-related injuries and illnesses that can cause serious immediate or long-term health problems. Members of the OHS Section are involved in preventing injuries, illnesses, disabilities, and deaths to those who work through advocacy, research, education and training, surveillance, designing preventive controls, diagnosis and treatment, policy, and regulatory compliance. The O'Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law, states that every fifteen seconds, a worker dies from a work-related injury or disease. Every day, 6,300 people die as a result of occupational injuries or work-related diseases. Of the more than 300 million injuries or illnesses that occur on the job annually, many of these result in extended absences from work, and millions more are permanently or temporarily disabled. This means a loss of income and social protection for workers and their families and a loss of human resources for the national and international economies. Join the OHS Section to help ensure that every worker returns home safe, healthy, and well. Visit the OHS Section FaceBook page: www.facebook.c...