Graduate Training in Occupational Health Psychology and Total Worker Health

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Program Director: Liu-Qin Yang, Ph.D. Project Summary/Abstract We are currently seeking a 5 year renewal for our Training Program Grant in Occupational Health Psychology (OHP) which has now been expanded to OHP-Total Worker Health. We are requesting support for a total of 4 full time doctoral students per year. Funded as the first OHP training program grant (TPG) in June of 2002, our program has served as a model for the development of other OHP programs. We received a 5-year renewal in June of 2005, another 5 year renewal in June 2010, and then another 5 year renewal in June 2015-June 2020. The graduate training program at Portland State University (PSU) is designed to address a growing discipline of Occupational Safety and Health (OSH), namely, Occupational Health Psychology (OHP), and the newly emerging discipline of Total Worker Health® (TWH). Our trainig program has been squarely focused on OHP for the past 17 years and is now being modified as part of our renewal to include TWH. OHP-TWH is an interdisciplinary field that involves the application of psychological principles for improving the quality of work-life and for promoting the safety, health, and well-being of people at work. OHP-TWH researchers and practitioners draw from the domains of public health, preventive medicine, nursing, industrial engineering, law, epidemiology, and psychology to develop sound theory and practice for protecting and promoting safety, health, and well-being in the workplace, such as through implementing interventions to eliminate or control workplace hazards and encouraging workplace enhancements to foster worker health and well-being. To date we have graduated a total of 28 students, with 8 of those graduating in the past 4 years with the OHP minor. All are employed in related fields using their OHP knowledge and skills. We currently have 16 students in the program. Our students have been placed in nationally-recognized internship programs and upon graduating they have been placed in academic, government, and industry jobs related to OHP and TWH. Over the years, our program has filled a need for specialized training in OHP, as well as a need for TPGs in our region. During this funding period we proactively sought ways to ensure that we have a strong multidisciplinary focus in the program and have significantly increased our collaboration with faculty at the Oregon Health and Sciences University (OHSU) through our participation in the Oregon Healthy Workforce Center (OHWC) described in the proposal. We have been involved in the development of the joint PSU-OHSU School of Public Health, and we have strengthened our ties with the University of Washington-ERC and the School of Public Health at Oregon State University. Through these interdisciplinary and inter-institutional connections, we have significantly expanded our program's focus from OHP to OHP-TWH, through expanding our required and elective OHP-TWH courses and research/internship/job opportunities for our trainees, as well as disseminating evidence-based OHP-TWH solutions to the national and international communities via both the biennial summer OHP-TWH institute and annual fall symposium on OHP-TWH. Furthermore, we have a wealth of methodology courses (e.g., Multi- Level Modeling, Structural Equation Modeling) for students. We have also joined the Consortium for the Advancement Research Methods and Analysis (CARMA) including webinars as an additional methodological resource for our students. The primary long term goals of our program are to provide formal graduate training in OHP-TWH and to serve as a national model for OHP-TWH training that successfully balances science and practice perspectives while remaining multidisciplinary in nature, and to support a developing graduate certificate in TWH that spans across Portland State Univeristy and Oregon Health and Science University.