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#54: What happens the day before the disaster
80 Plays5 years ago
Podcast series host Jill James interviews Chip Hughes, award-winning Director with the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS). Chip runs an innovative program securing cooperative agreements for rapid deployment of new safety and health training programs for workers involved in hazardous substance response. Example? NIEHS COVID-19 Response Training. Chip sets the bar for emergency response training expertise. Don’t miss this.
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Transcript
Introduction and Guest Overview
00:00:10
Speaker
This is the Accidental Safety Pro brought to you by Vivid Learning Systems and the Health and Safety Institute. This is a special edition of the podcast recorded on April 16th, 2020. My name is Jill James, Vivid's Chief Safety Officer, and today I'm joined by Chip Hughes. Chip is currently the director of an innovative federal safety and health training program based at the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, or the NIEHS.
00:00:36
Speaker
The program supports cooperative agreements to develop and deliver model safety and health training programs for workers involved in hazardous substance response with numerous universities, unions, community colleges, and other nonprofit organizations throughout the nation.
Awards and Contributions of Chip Hughes
00:00:52
Speaker
For the past 20 years, Chip has worked in both private and public sectors in developing environmental occupational health education programs for workers and citizens in high-risk occupations and communities. As part of this work, he has pioneered efforts to create new methods and approaches for conducting needs assessments, reaching underserved populations, developing training partnerships, and creating innovative program evaluation and assessment measures.
00:01:19
Speaker
Chip was given the Health and Human Service Secretary's Award for Exceptional Service in November 2001 for his role in responding to the World Trade Center attacks. And after the NIEHS response to the Katrina disaster, Chip was given the HHS Secretary's Award for Distinguished Service in 2006.
00:01:41
Speaker
and the NIH Director's Award in 2011 for responding to the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. In 2011, CHIP was given the Tony Mazoki Award for Lifetime Achievement by the National Council for Occupational Safety and Health.
NIEHS's Role in COVID-19 Response
00:01:57
Speaker
Under CHIP's leadership, the NIEHS grant support of $40 million is annually committed for the development and administration of model worker safety and health training programs consisting of classroom, hands-on, online, computer-based, and practical safety and health training for workers and their supervisors who are engaged in activities related to hazardous material and emergency response.
00:02:22
Speaker
Those last two words, my guess, emergency response, is exactly why I asked Chip to be our guest today.
History of NIEHS Worker Training Program
00:02:29
Speaker
While we would love to hear his story of how he wound up in safety and health like all of our other guests, and maybe he'll tell us a little bit of that today too, I asked him here today to spread word of the work that the NIHS is doing now to help respond to our current COVID-19 pandemic and how you can access that help for your workforce. So, Chip, welcome to the show.
00:02:53
Speaker
Thank you, Jill. So Chip, let's kind of maybe start from the beginning for maybe people who've never heard of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences before. Is it part of the National Institute of Health or how does that work?
00:03:10
Speaker
Yeah, we're a part of the 27 institutes of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences. And really going way back to the 80s, there was an effort in Superfund to start to think about protecting people who were responding to Superfund cleanups and
00:03:34
Speaker
We had a combined program between research, health research, and then training, safety and health training. And that was authorized under the Superfund-SARA Act in 1986.
Evolution and Crisis Management
00:03:49
Speaker
So that's when the worker training program and the Superfund program came to NIHS. Wow. So it's been around a long time. Yeah.
00:04:00
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. So what sort of crisis does the worker training program respond to or has responded to in the past? How does that work?
00:04:12
Speaker
Well, I guess, you know, where we started and there's kind of a famous picture of Elizabeth New Jersey Chemical Control Superfund site ablaze. And in the foreground, there's a picture of
00:04:38
Speaker
a New York City firefighter, FDNY, in his dressed blues, actually, just his regular sort of uniform.
00:04:50
Speaker
who's rowing a boat. And in the boat is an EPA emergency response team staff person in full level A moon suit. And the boat was being rowed across the river in Elizabeth, New Jersey to the Superfund site.
00:05:13
Speaker
And
OSHA and HasWAPR Standards
00:05:14
Speaker
as any safety and health professional who might look at the picture and say, what's wrong with this picture? It became kind of a metaphor for where our program began, which is knowing that for us as federal workers, we usually have a really high level of protection. We have access to training. We have access to resources.
00:05:42
Speaker
We have safety and health plans. We've sort of thought through our response. But for the other workers who are at this point, a Superfund emergency, who are local people who might be cleanup workers or local emergency responders,
00:06:03
Speaker
there was sort of no protection or there was no thought about what protecting folks would need to encompass. So that is kind of how section 126 of Sarah was created, which created two parts.
Disaster Response Strategies
00:06:23
Speaker
One, it ordered OSHA for, I think, the only time in its history to promulgate a standard for HasWAPR, 1910-120, and it set up a grant program as a companion to that, which was our program on HasWAPR.
00:06:42
Speaker
That's kind of how we started and really with that idea that we have kind of a giant divide in this country between people who get a lot of protection and people get no protection. So that's kind of where we started from that picture. Wow. And so the audience that you serve then changes likely with the emergency that's happening in the country.
00:07:13
Speaker
for sure and obviously when you look over the last 30 years in each individual one and for our program probably the first one that happened as a national disaster was the Exxon Valdez oil spill which was kind of the first time that there was a large-scale mobilization of an army of cleanup workers
00:07:43
Speaker
that attempted to do cleanup of the oil on the shores of the sound in Alaska. And so that was sort of the first time, and this is sort of ironic, that
00:08:06
Speaker
The Hazwapper standard was in process of being promulgated. I think the emergency temporary standard had been promulgated and the state of Alaska and the federal government asked for an exemption from the training requirements for the people who were involved in the cleanup.
00:08:33
Speaker
This has come back to haunt our nation a number of times where we say, well, you know what? We really don't have time to do training. And we really don't have time to go through this whole protocol of Haswapper. We just can only do just-in-time training for people who are exposed.
00:09:01
Speaker
So an exemption was granted for people who are what are called skill support personnel, which is a category of has whopper, where for people who respond to disasters, there's sort of a minimum amount of information that people are given about what exposure situation that they're facing.
00:09:22
Speaker
Anyway, in the Exxon Valdez, that was the first time that OSHA sort of, I'll try to say this nicely, suspended its regulations because of a disaster.
Timing of Training During Disasters
00:09:36
Speaker
And of course, I could go on
00:09:40
Speaker
numerous examples of the past 30 years of where this has continued to happen but you know for us in our program we feel like a disaster is a time when you need to pay even more attention to protection not not not pay attention to protection so that that's sort of a little background on
00:10:06
Speaker
why our program became important and why we, in a lot of ways, got stuck in this position of always having to do just-in-time training, which I always call just-too-late training, because what it is that you need to know, for example, if a pandemic's gonna happen, we do know what needs to happen for people
00:10:32
Speaker
who were engaged in infectious disease response. But unfortunately for most people who are engaged in that, they've not had the necessary training at an operations level, for example, to be able to understand how to protect themselves. So, anyhow.
00:10:51
Speaker
Yeah, so your organization in times of in times of crisis, in times of emergency of various types, you know, like we like people heard about in the introduction and some of the examples we've given now, your organization is looked to to provide that unfortunate just in time training. And so yeah, right. And so which when when things like are happening now happen, which different agencies or organizations
00:11:20
Speaker
become your sources of information to pull all of this just-in-time training together, assuming that it doesn't simply happen just at your organization, but you're reaching into different places, too, correct? Yes. I mean, a couple of things on that for your audience. The National Response Framework and the National Recovery Framework, which used to be called the National
00:11:47
Speaker
Response plan also the national contingency plan. Interestingly, the national contingency plan, which deals with.
00:12:00
Speaker
Oil spills and chemical spills was actually started out of the Superfund, out of Circla. That would have been in 1980 during the Love Canal response. So the structure of the federal government's response
00:12:20
Speaker
you know, is built on interagency cooperation, usually under the leadership of FEMA, although in the case of a biological event,
Interagency Cooperation in Emergencies
00:12:32
Speaker
it's under the leadership of Health and Human Services, the agency I work for, which
00:12:39
Speaker
We could throw in another whole tangent about why the national biodefense strategy is not integrated into the national response plan and gets to the question of who's in charge.
00:12:56
Speaker
ESFs, which are emergency support functions, are sort of the federal structure in which groups of agencies partner as teams in the National Response Plan. So, NIEHS and ATSDR and a number of the agencies that were created under the Superfund were written in as part of the National Contingency Plan.
00:13:24
Speaker
So that we sort of have a role to play in national response and we fit into a structure of support functions that are what make up the national response team. So what we do in our
00:13:43
Speaker
Moving to activation, we have our emergency support activation plan that is done in concert with other federal agencies. That's when we begin the process of.
00:13:59
Speaker
assessing the situation, doing a needs assessment on training, gathering core documents that relate to worker protection issues, initiate contact with frontline workers in the disaster and the organizations that they are a part of. And so I guess over the years, we've developed a, I guess, a methodology
00:14:27
Speaker
of how we actually move to a practice-based, evidence-based, science-based information source that is what's possible for us to develop training tools and products and classes and curricula that can be useful for people to understand how to protect themselves.
00:14:53
Speaker
And every time we've gone through that process, and what's sort of funny, I remember, I think Hurricane Katrina went through, I think, eight to ten different versions of our guidance. You know, as the situation changed, the risks changed, the hazards changed, the people, the populations that are involved changed.
00:15:20
Speaker
Anyway, so we've gone through that every time and sort of have a process for that.
Infectious Disease Training Evolution
00:15:25
Speaker
Yeah, so let's talk about the current crisis that your organization is responding to. What does that response look like right now? What have you been working on? Who have you pulled together? And what's available? Yes. Well,
00:15:46
Speaker
Going back a little bit of some history, we built an infectious disease response program after we received supplemental funds during the Ebola crisis in 2015.
00:16:05
Speaker
And a lot of what we were exploring at that time, we did a national training assessment on infectious disease preparedness at that time. And that was probably right when the first patients from Africa had been brought back to the United States and were being treated at
00:16:34
Speaker
Emory and Nebraska, Texas, New York. We started exploring kind of what the relationship is between the occupational and environmental health community and literature and guidance and
00:16:56
Speaker
uh, what the, what the nature of infectious disease and biosafety, uh, related approaches are. And you know, what we learned is that those two worlds, I'll say, are, and disciplines and, uh, professions, uh, are, are kind of, um,
00:17:19
Speaker
worlds apart in a sense that there's not a lot of communication and integration that happens around dealing with pathogens
00:17:34
Speaker
in a sense of what we as professionals would think about as Seaburn, chemical radioactive nuclear bio, you know, kind of traditional hazard thinking strategy. So one of the things that we did was created kind of an all pathogens approach to
00:17:55
Speaker
Infectious disease response and and created a pathogen safety data project that was a way to build. I'll say you like this before pathogen literacy yes i was just guy just wrote that in my notes cuz i heard you say pathogen literacy before and that we have a.
00:18:15
Speaker
pathogen illiteracy issue in our country. Yes, we have a great deficit in pathogen literacy and I know I'm going out of tangent but I think I'll bring it back. We found that Public Health of Canada had been kind of pioneers in building pathogen safety data sheets
00:18:40
Speaker
So in the middle of this Ebola crisis, we were thinking about building kind of a pathogen-based has whopper program that would be an all hazards and an all pathogens approach to doing training for people who are emergency responders and cleanup workers.
00:19:04
Speaker
So, what we learned is that, you know, we will say in occupational health might be very familiar with MSDSs or after global harmonization, SDSs. But we found that there was very little knowledge of PSDSs.
00:19:24
Speaker
and that the principles of infection control, disinfection, all the things that we now as a country are very familiar with because we've been educated by COVID-19 were protection principles that were different than what we as health and safety professionals in a chemical
00:19:51
Speaker
context or radiation context or nuclear context might not be as familiar with. So we decided that we would try to build programs that would
00:20:05
Speaker
create literacy and practice and knowledge within a broad sort of swarth of viruses, bacteria, and other organisms that we don't think a lot about. And we as a program have had actually long experience
00:20:29
Speaker
We actually, I think we built the, we built the first anthrax course, uh, in conjunction with the postal workers, uh, after the anthrax attacks. Uh, and again, same kind of thing. How do we think about Haswapper and the precautionary principle in an anthrax situation? Um, and, and at that time we were focused on postal workers, uh, earlier on, um,
00:20:54
Speaker
actually subsequent to that. We, we did a big project with H5N1, the bird flu. And again, that was another one where our grantees in Iowa were kind of on the front lines with culling.
00:21:14
Speaker
Do you want me to be more specific? Yes. No, I know that I worked in the poultry industry. Yeah. But anyway, you know, like in that we had a partnership with APHIS in USDA and, you know, built a program for agricultural workers. And again, all those principles that now we know so well about
00:21:40
Speaker
contact tracing, infection control, disinfection, social distancing. Those are all principles that we worked on.
Adapting Training for COVID-19
00:21:49
Speaker
Actually, we worked on with the Pentagon, we worked on with USDA. And I'll give you one funny tangent. It's the only meeting where I ever had a military person assigned to protect me during the meeting. When you were at the Pentagon?
00:22:05
Speaker
No, no, no. With the agriculture department, we wanted to have a meeting to talk about our H5N1 training around bird flu. And they were concerned that we would even have a public discussion about what we were talking about, which of course
00:22:29
Speaker
It was about killing animals, okay? So it was funny because each of us who were speakers and main participants had a military person assigned to protect us from
00:22:49
Speaker
People, no, but people who are concerned about animal rights, which I, you know, I totally, as a one health person, I totally get, but it was sort of funny to think back that that concern, there was not any concern about the workers.
00:23:05
Speaker
but there's a lot of concern about the animals. About the animals, right. Anyway. Oh, interesting. Yes, interesting tangent. Thank you for sharing that. Sorry, sorry. Bring me back from my tangent of that. Yeah, so what you're saying is you have many levers at your disposal. This isn't the first time that your agency is considered like, what do we do in a situation like this with pathogens?
00:23:30
Speaker
In fact, you've been working on it for a long time and so you're pulling those levers together now. What's likely different, I'm guessing, is who those emergency workers are now and what your audience is and how varied it is in terms of people who need training and information right now.
00:23:52
Speaker
Definitely. I mean, always our work starts with emergency responders. We've actually had a 30 year relationship with the International Association of Firefighters. And they have been, I'll say kind of our North Star in terms of emergency responder protection. And
00:24:21
Speaker
being able to sort of build out from NFPA and kind of what would be the highest level of protection that we might want for folks doing a response and sort of starting there, which is sort of what the precautionary principle is all about.
00:24:48
Speaker
You know, as we go into situations where we face unknown levels of exposure, of course, the old idea from the textbooks, going back to Ramzini or Alice Hamilton, you know, is that you want to start with a higher level of protection. And then as you characterize an environment, you can move down to lower levels of protection.
Training Community Volunteers
00:25:16
Speaker
But unfortunately, that's not usually how things happen. And so that's been kind of a challenge for us with populations who get pulled into different aspects of disasters as they move from response to recovery that
00:25:38
Speaker
big groups of people kind of get drawn in to having exposure and having engagement with the hazardous substances that we're sort of concerned about affecting their health. So, just as another, for example, I had said something about the
00:26:01
Speaker
Exxon Valdez and Alaska, you know, when the Deepwater Horizon happened. Actually, I was with my friend David was the head of OSHA.
00:26:18
Speaker
And John Howard, the head of NIOSH, called him up and just sort of said, you know, maybe we should go do something because I think this is going to be a really big deal. And that was when we sort of forged a partnership with BP.
00:26:41
Speaker
early on and with the Coast Guard to kind of plan for like what we hadn't done as well in in Alaska knowing that
00:26:57
Speaker
all of a sudden there would be these hundreds of vessels of opportunity that would be sucking up oil and collecting oil with skimmers and hundreds of thousands of people rescuing pelicans and cleaning rocks. And so again, like how that one rolled out
00:27:25
Speaker
We were able, in partnership with federal agencies, the state, BP, Texas A&M, a number of other folks, built a training program with a four-hour course that was delivered to about 100,000 people in a couple of weeks.
00:27:53
Speaker
During that was well after April 24 so during May and June of whatever year that was So that that you know that was one where You know the the people who would be the ones who would be
00:28:13
Speaker
what we would consider the frontline workers, it was kind of hard to imagine ahead of time, but like with so many disasters and bringing it up a little bit closer to the current, you know, in Katrina and then specifically in Hurricane Sandy, you know, where we have
Building a Safety Culture
00:28:40
Speaker
disasters over broad geographical areas, the shock troops become community volunteers, church members, local residents who get conscripted. So in each of those cases, a lot of what happened is that
00:29:03
Speaker
the training materials and the training process and the leveraging of PPE and became focused on building through VOADs, Volunteers and Disasters Organizations, as it became clear that they were kind of in a place of vulnerability.
00:29:32
Speaker
So, you know, each one, you know, gets is a little different in both. I think I'm trying to go back to your original question, which is about target populations and change how we sort of target those populations.
00:29:51
Speaker
And what the process of figuring that out is. Yeah. And so your organization has this history of rapidly pulling together training, which is what you're doing right now as well. And then you need to get it into people's hands. And a little bit ago, you mentioned to your grantees. So you're also a granting organization. Yes.
00:30:15
Speaker
Those grantees are part of the piece that gets information, the training, specifically into hands of people who need it, correct? Yes. I am actually a boring bureaucrat in my other life.
00:30:32
Speaker
I administer your federal dollars and invest them every year in actually efforts that we hope protect the most number of people with
00:30:47
Speaker
the highest risk that we perceive. And I'll just say, I mean, my philosophy about disaster response, it's really just about what you do every day.
00:31:02
Speaker
And so building a safety-conscious workforce isn't about what happens during a disaster. It's about what happens the day before the disaster. It's what you do every day, and it's how you are conscious, your health conscious and your safety conscious of what your job is, what your tasks are, what your hazards are.
00:31:30
Speaker
So really the idea of our grant program is to create training courses that build cadres both of trainers and trainees that are have
00:31:47
Speaker
kind of a mission of building a safety culture within this country that can be kind of infused into the operations of organizations
00:32:03
Speaker
They might be corporations, they might be agencies, they might be community groups or volunteer groups or churches. But, you
Rapid Development of COVID-19 Training Tools
00:32:12
Speaker
know, to kind of infuse that knowledge that we as health professionals maybe take for granted about
00:32:20
Speaker
what industrial hygiene is about, or what epidemiology is about, or what safety engineering is about, or what ergonomics is about. But to be able to take that and socialize it and kind of embed it within organizations where that isn't necessarily what their main purpose is.
00:32:41
Speaker
And to me, then that's more what our mission that we really took on after, we'll say after the pile at ground zero was how do we prepare a nation, a nation that has preparedness for a broad spectrum of emergencies and then organizations that can also be disaster ready
00:33:10
Speaker
So, I'd say our organization of our grantees that are universities and unions and community colleges and local organizations have really had that as their mission, which is to credit, try to create a prepared workforce to be able to handle
00:33:32
Speaker
whatever is thrown at us by either God or our enemies or circumstance, you know, sort of broadly. Mother nature. Yeah, she throws this stuff at us too, climate change.
00:33:48
Speaker
Chipp, tell our audience about the training that you've rapidly developed for this crisis, for the COVID-19 pandemic. Where is that available and what's on the horizon for next and next training as this continues to evolve? Sure. I actually remember
00:34:17
Speaker
New Year's dinner. I think I was at a Chinese restaurant. You know, just, you know, sort of noticing Wuhan and what was going on and kind of watching, having lived through the same sort of
00:34:38
Speaker
a daunting awareness of WTF. What's going on here? That maybe this is something to pay attention to. Your Spidey senses are up. Yeah, definitely.
00:34:54
Speaker
And since we've been through it before, knowing what the potential was for that. So we had started thinking about this earlier on and then watching kind of the
00:35:10
Speaker
The, maybe the, the, the reticence at moving forward. By certain parts of our government that that we thought it would be a good idea to lean forward. So we did start leaning forward and drew a lot on our infectious disease grantees and the expertise that we'd had before.
00:35:33
Speaker
And then by the time late February and March came, we had already decided that we would launch our training tool on COVID-19 since it had been named. And since looking at information coming, particularly from the WHO, doctors from borders, colleagues in China and later in Italy.
00:35:59
Speaker
That the issue of worker protection was central to the issue of dealing with the epidemic, the pandemic and the virus. So, we sort of saw this as.
00:36:15
Speaker
kind of bore in our wheelhouse in terms of bringing the core principles of worker protection to the table for the preparedness of our own country and our own workforce as something that had kind of been part of what we've always done anyway, but knowing that there's very specific
00:36:44
Speaker
public health, worker health, environmental health, infection prevention, messages that need to be brought to specific parts of the workforce that we could see were going to be sucked into this process with health care and emergency response being number one and number one.
00:37:05
Speaker
So we started building a training tool that gathered guidance across the government, convened meetings with other agencies.
00:37:18
Speaker
Start to be start to be informed by local groups on the ground, like in Seattle, where the 1st outbreak came. I also remember the 1st group that met the.
00:37:37
Speaker
What's it called? The Diamond Princess? The ship. Actually, we're good friends and colleagues. We're part of that process who had been sent, if you remember,
00:37:53
Speaker
That was actually the first whistleblower situation for federal workers. Right, sent to California to get those people off the ship. Yeah, with no protection. So, yeah, thinking back, that was a real
00:38:09
Speaker
kick in the pants because then it gets personal when it's people you know. And I remember that made us even want to ramp up war when we knew that federal employees were being deployed with no training and no protection.
00:38:28
Speaker
into exposure situations which should have no business happening. So the training that's been created so far is for emergency response workers as you've identified them for this particular emergency.
Online and Free Training Resources
00:38:48
Speaker
And then that training obviously is being used by your grantees, the organizations that you had just mentioned, but it's also available to anyone
00:38:57
Speaker
on your website, correct? Yes, yes, yes. Okay, and so we can, yeah, go ahead. Yeah, and now we get to the part about why we should mention Vivid, you know? Well, that's not what I was, yeah, so the training, the training is available. But the online training is available through Health and Safety Institute Vivid, you know, definitely go there. Yeah, yeah. No, and I'm trying to go somewhere with this, okay?
00:39:26
Speaker
Yes. I'm not just doing marketing. Tell me about your website so that people know where to find that and we'll be sure to put it in the show notes as well. Yes. Our producer Will will include it there. Yes. Yes. Well, we went through a very lengthy and
00:39:42
Speaker
wonderful process of getting authorization from the White House Coronavirus Task Force to release information that had been blessed. That was kind of the core of what we could assemble and discern from all of the guidance that was given by other agencies. And it's available on our website for download. It's available
00:40:07
Speaker
It's available on a phone, it's available in a computer, it's available for trainers to train in a Zoom platform or in a face-to-face platform. And no, I also wanted to mention the online platform and that was what is kind of really exciting about this initiative.
00:40:28
Speaker
Jill is that the virtual safety training initiative for covet nineteen. You know, is really the 1st time that we've built a large national engagement around virtual training, online training, community computer based training.
00:40:48
Speaker
that we've really engaged, let's say hundreds of organizations and people and thousands of people in trying to quickly come up to speed about worker protection issues. And I've been really excited about that because it's brought together kind of the core principles that we believe in about adult education.
00:41:13
Speaker
Which the learner engagement and kind of smart classrooms are a core part of what we believe is part of a blended learning approach that can engage learners in the classroom, engage them virtually, engage them in
00:41:31
Speaker
hands-on activities and be able to do that quickly in a way that hopefully increases the level of protection and the sort of safety consciousness of people who are COVID-19 responders right now. And so kind of where we've
00:41:53
Speaker
The journey that you've been on with us over the last month or so is that we've been in the middle of a hard pivot of moving towards
00:42:10
Speaker
responding to what are termed to be the essential workforces that really are critical to life-sustaining activities. And we probably never would have imagined that
00:42:32
Speaker
You know, the food store could become a hazmat site or the delivery of food could become a hazmat encounter. And that we would have to have a level of consciousness among the workforce and among those organizations to be able to ramp up their level of protection and their safety consciousness. So we're in the middle right now of
00:43:02
Speaker
completing our essential worker training tool. And really our hard pivot is around this question of bringing back the economy and bringing back organizations, corporations,
00:43:17
Speaker
different sectors and knowing that the new normal that we all know as safety and health professionals is going to look really different from
00:43:33
Speaker
what the old normal was pre-pandemic and that we know that you can't do that unless you have a highly protected, highly motivated, highly educated workforce to be able to engage in essential daily activities without
00:43:57
Speaker
Increasing the potential for more cases, for more flare ups, for hot spots, unless we have that kind of level of safety awareness that is going to be necessary to move forward without creating a second wave or a third wave.
00:44:17
Speaker
So that's kind of, I'd say, where we are right now. Right, right. Yeah, and your organization had to make a quick pivot. You know, you had mentioned, you know, you have cadres of trainers who are used to doing these things in person with human beings in a room all these years and the initiatives that you've done. And then suddenly it's like, you know, we have to apply the brakes because we can't do that
Digital Training Transition
00:44:40
Speaker
anymore.
00:44:40
Speaker
And so having to come up with all of these unique ways like so many people here are experiencing just with having meetings and using all of these platforms to be able to do meetings virtually and we needed to do the same thing for training. And so Chip you were kind in mentioning our company a little bit ago.
00:45:00
Speaker
And the fact that we've been working together, which is part of it. So we've just been part of the solution in helping bring an online platform to that. And thank you for that opportunity to serve in this way. No, and also what's funny, Jill, is that, as you may remember, when digital chip, hashtag digital chip, at digital chip,
00:45:28
Speaker
That's my Twitter handle. I've been a digital native. I launched our advanced training technology initiative in 1997. We created the principles of adult learning and advanced training technology. I believe that was the last century, if you're keeping track. Wow. Ahead of the curve chip.
00:45:51
Speaker
Sort of, yeah. Well, I could really do a long tangent about our workers guide to Y2K, which maybe in another episode, we could talk about that. We'll happily have you back. Yeah. But where I was trying to go with this is that I had actually reached out to you when we decided we were going to build out our
00:46:16
Speaker
minimum criteria to encompass online learning and blended learning. And Jill was really what our keynote speaker for our training technology.
00:46:30
Speaker
workshop, which I don't, I can't remember when that was a couple of years ago. I think it was four, maybe four or five years ago. Yeah, something like that. And out of that, actually, our minimum criteria that if you're keeping track
00:46:46
Speaker
is actually Appendix E of 1910-120, 29 CFR, which is the criteria for training. And that has been our sort of Bible or Talmud.
00:47:03
Speaker
for doing training and the principles of adult education in health and safety, which is actually people paying attention. ANSI standard Z490, that I was one of the people who started that, which is the criteria for environmental health and safety training.
00:47:30
Speaker
which now has an e-learning annex. Anyway, we have tried to sort of be true to our principles in doing this digital shift. And as you know, we did a rather large train-the-trainer operation for
00:47:53
Speaker
I can't remember, that was like a six-hour block where, you know, what I was so excited about was we did a webinar, WebEx with about 150 people. We had an hour for our train-the-trainer. Then we had, using Zoom, each of the groups had a team of four to six people who, during breakout,
00:48:22
Speaker
worked as a team in their Zoom breakout rooms and then came back together for doing their report backs to the bigger group of, so each of the four people that would report back to the 150 people.
00:48:41
Speaker
I believe I can remember when that was like a couple of weeks ago. It was a couple of weeks ago and it was really it was really pretty amazing because it was this these yeah you said a couple hundred people who are normally in front of audiences doing their training and they're using the training tool that you've developed and all of a sudden you're like okay break out into your sessions and report back and I think we all just sort of collectively held our breath like is this going to work?
00:49:08
Speaker
And remarkably, it did. And it was beautiful. And we heard back from all of these people. And it was really fun to be part of. Yeah. I mean, just the quality of what we got back from the groups was amazing. Yeah. And when I say fun, that's definitely an operative word right now in our current situation. Because we're listening to so much heartbreak. But when it's working and people are getting value out of it, that's where the fun piece comes in
00:49:38
Speaker
for any of us who are doing work of safety and health for sure. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No, and I think that doubling back to an earlier conversation, you know, mental health, we've learned, we built a large
00:49:55
Speaker
disaster resilience program with SAMHSA after Deepwater Horizon. And actually that was a big part of Hurricane Sandy, where, you know, I think part of my responsibility is to keep the spirits lifted of our community.
Holistic Approach to Emergency Preparedness
00:50:19
Speaker
And I know I do it because
00:50:21
Speaker
You know, now it's like, I'm a Zoom administrator for my men's group, for my temple, for my family. I host pandemic Pilates every Saturday morning.
00:50:37
Speaker
Coming back to the issue about how we say minister to and care for our communities and really that goes back to another earlier theme. I think that.
00:50:54
Speaker
we saw that occupational health and environmental health cannot be and should not be separated from mental health as an issue. And that's sort of a core part of our resilience program for disaster responders and disaster supervisors is that taking a broad view of what being healthy means
00:51:21
Speaker
has really always been a big part of our program. And so the fact that we need to use these new digital tools as a way to maintain human contact, you know, has just become so important, I think, to all of us. And we know
00:51:48
Speaker
that there's still a giant digital divide out there that we've always really been very cognizant of with technology. But I think we've come a long way towards overcoming some of those technology barriers because of this disaster and the immediacy of the need for maintaining human contact.
00:52:14
Speaker
So when you say fun, I think that's what you're referring to. Maybe nobody would call what we're doing fun, but I know I'm working harder than I've ever worked in my life and I'm having fun.
00:52:32
Speaker
Yeah, right. Yeah, using that as the operative word. I know. I think we've all shed buckets of tears. Yeah, definitely. Trying to meet the needs that are so valid in our faces right now.
00:52:50
Speaker
So when people go to the NIHS website again to find this training that we're talking about, which we'll put in the show notes, they'll be able to find the first iteration of the protecting yourself from COVID-19 in the workplace is what its title is. And like Chip was saying, it's available
00:53:09
Speaker
in both a downloadable version that you can have and a PDF if you want with notes in it. If you're a trainer, you can take it the online version and it's free to anyone. You don't have to pay for this.
00:53:25
Speaker
And then that same website continues to put valuable information out there for people to access. And then Chip, you were mentioning that the next pieces of training that are under development right now are for essential workers and kind of breaking up different hazard pieces, if I'm understanding correctly, right? Yes,
Pathogen Literacy Workshops
00:53:49
Speaker
yes. Yeah, let me just say, I think the other seminal event
00:53:55
Speaker
that happened, which was St. Patrick's Day, the weirdest St. Patrick's Day ever. We had our COVID-19 response meeting workshop that was supposed to be in Atlanta.
00:54:10
Speaker
And we that that is now actually, I believe it's a 6 hour block that is available on our website and just ironically, you know, we had already planned to do.
00:54:26
Speaker
The meeting, sort of in two segments, one was what are the roots of the difficulties in our bio preparedness as a nation and it was conceived as a lessons learned meeting from our Ebola response and what went well.
00:54:47
Speaker
what didn't go so well. And then we again pivoted to using that as sort of if you want to look at why we weren't prepared and then what we're doing to be prepared in the afternoon session. But that's also available on our website for viewing
00:55:12
Speaker
And all the presentations, and then I'll also just say we, we also have had a webinar series. So we've hosted large webinars around.
00:55:25
Speaker
healthcare issues, research, emergency response, training issues that are also all available on our website if people want to get, increase their pathogen literacy. I think we have a lot of information and don't miss the PSD module if you're a real geek and you really want to get into pathogens.
Closing and Community Engagement
00:55:51
Speaker
that's also available. Yeah and these workshops are happening weekly and have been for the last number of weeks and so all of those are available on the website as well. This particular weeks was about respiratory protection and it was valuable presented by the University of Maryland
00:56:18
Speaker
correct, if I'm remembering, and it was fantastic, so look for that as well. Chip, I know you're saying one thing about that, I mean it was interesting, that was started to be focused on elastomeric respirators, and I think the thing that we've always been concerned is the gap of
00:56:42
Speaker
Well, we coined the term HasWAPR for healthcare many years ago, my friend Paul, but healthcare has not embraced a HasWAPR approach and there is not a big leap really to be able to do better in protecting healthcare workers with taking
00:57:06
Speaker
I'll say a has whopper approach or has met approach and that was what we were trying to emphasize in this week's presentation that really it was because the University of Maryland after H1N1 2009
00:57:21
Speaker
embraced a kind of worker protection approach based on the hierarchy of controls that made them so much more ready to treat patients in this pandemic because of what they'd learned back in 2009. Using those best practices from house whopper. Yeah, that was really good. Yeah, it was.
00:57:49
Speaker
Thank you so much for your time today. Really, really appreciate it. And thanks for your leadership all of these years, allowing so many people to stand on your shoulders so that we can reach out to the workforce who needs us now more than ever. And thanks for letting us be part of that too.
00:58:13
Speaker
Hey, I'm a civil servant. You're a taxpayer. I'll basically do whatever you tell me to do. Hopefully you get your value out of your tax dollars. That's my goal. Well, we appreciate that as well. Great. And to all of our guests, thank you so much for spending your time listening today. And more importantly, thank you for your contribution, making sure your workers, including your temporary workers, make it home safe every day.
00:58:37
Speaker
If you'd like to join the conversation about this episode or any of our previous episodes, follow our page and join the Accidental Safety Pro community group on Facebook. If you're not subscribed and want to hear past episodes or future episodes, you can subscribe in iTunes, the Apple Podcast app, or any other podcast player that you'd like.
00:58:55
Speaker
You can also find all the episodes at vividlearningsystems.com slash podcast. We'd love it if you could leave a rating and review us on iTunes. It helps us connect the show with more and more safety and health professionals like you and I and Chip. If you have a suggestion for a guest, including if it's yourself, please contact me at social at vividlearningsystems.com. Special thanks to Will Moss, our podcast producer. And until next time, thanks for listening.