Practical Strategies and Tools for Use by Occupational and Environmental Medicine Departments During COVID-19 Pandemic Surges.
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ABSTRACT: Objectives
Occupational and environmental medicine (OEM) departments in healthcare institutions can be quickly overwhelmed when COVID-19 infection rates rapidly and simultaneously increase in the workforce and the patients served. Our goal is to present a detailed toolkit of practical approaches for use by front-line OEM specialists to address workforce management tasks during pandemic surges.Methods
Specific focus is on tasks related to employee symptom triage, exposure risk assessment, workplace contact tracing, and work restrictions.Results
Tools include strategies used by customer call centers, two decision support algorithms (exposure due to cohabitation or non-cohabitation), a color-coded employee case tracking tool, a contact tracing protocol, and documentation templates that serve as memory aids for encounters.Conclusions
These tools are created with commonly used software. Implementation is feasible in most front-line OEM settings, including those with limited resources.
SUBMITTER: Guo AH
PROVIDER: S-EPMC8715935 | biostudies-literature |
REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature
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Project description:BackgroundDuring the last 5 years a fundamental curriculum reform was realized at the medical school of the Ludwig-Maximilians-University. In contrast to those efforts, the learning objectives were not defined consistently for the curriculum and important questions concerning the curriculum could not be answered. This also applied to Occupational and Environmental Medicine where teachers of both courses were faced with additional problems such as the low number of students attending the lectures.The aims of the study were to develop and analyse a curriculum map for Occupational and Environmental Medicine based on learning objectives using a web-based database.Furthermore we aimed to evaluate student perception about the curricular structure.MethodsUsing a web-based learning objectives database, a curriculum map for Occupational and Environmental Medicine was developed and analysed. Additionally online evaluations of students for each course were conducted.ResultsThe results show a discrepancy between the taught and the assessed curriculum. For both curricula, we identified that several learning objectives were not covered in the curriculum. There were overlaps with other content domains and redundancies within both curricula. 53% of the students in Occupational Medicine and 43% in Environmental Medicine stated that there is a lack of information regarding the learning objectives of the curriculum.ConclusionsThe results of the curriculum mapping and the poor evaluation results for the courses suggest a need for re-structuring both curricula.
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