Welcome, everybody. Thank you for joining us at our International Occupational Medicine Society Collaborative. How about this? There you go. Okay. Welcome. So we're going to review several different elements of our organization, who we are, what we're doing. You're going to hear from these esteemed colleagues. Just by way of introduction, Dr. Peter Coniston, he's secretary on our executive committee of IOMSC. Dr. Richard Heron, he's co-chair with me of IOMSC. Dr. Herman Spanyard is also on the executive committee. And then we have two esteemed colleagues from the U.K., Dr. Lanre and Dr. Steven, that are going to give some updates about Society of Occupational Medicine and the Faculty of Occupational Medicine in the U.K. So we will have time at the end for questions, but if there's anything along the way that you want to have clarification of or you want to ask about, feel free to interrupt. Okay. So I'll start kind of an overview and talk about what we're doing with the World Health Organization as an official collaborating center. Then Dr. Heron will talk about the ILO and the World Economic Forums and work we've been doing with those organizations. Dr. Coniston will talk about he was at the Indonesia OMA meeting and presented there and is going to give an update in that regard. Herman and also Marianne will provide some comments about our education committee at the IOMSC, and then we'll get the updates from Lanre and Steven. Just for your awareness, those of you that are IOMSC member society representatives, we will have our annual general meeting by Zoom on June 4th. So we started this in 2013. We have seen it grow significantly over the years to where we now have 52 occupational environmental medicine societies as members, AECOM being one of those members, in 46 countries. Interestingly, I'm pleased to announce that we've also got six new occupational medical societies that have expressed interest in becoming members and will likely spread our footprint globally to over 50 countries being involved. So we're excited about that. So I want to give you an update. The World Health Organization, Dr. Ivan Ivanov, who heads up the Global Occupational Workplace Health Division in Geneva of WHO, led a meeting of collaborating centers and WHO strategic priorities. So Richard and I participated in that by Zoom. It was held in Marrakesh at the same time as the ICO meeting. So just so that you're aware, the definition of a WHO collaborating center is designated by WHO to carry out regional or global activities in support of the WHO programs. And the designation of being a collaborative center with WHO is always the formalization of an existing successful collaboration because we've been doing work with WHO for several years but got the formal designation in about 18 months ago. And it provides organizations with enhanced visibility and recognition by national authorities, calling public attention to the health issues on which they work, opens up improved opportunities for them to exchange information and develop technical cooperation with other organizations, particularly at the international level, and mobilize additional and sometimes important resources from funding partners. These are the top four priorities that came out of this WHO collaborating center meeting. This is going to be areas of focus for research, mobilizing the evidence base, et cetera. Occupational health and safety of healthcare workers being number one on the list. I'll go into a little more detail about that. And then healthy, safe, resilient workplaces for all. And then occupational health and climate change and occupational health services in the informal gig economy. Specifically we shared with the collaborating center participants in this WHO meeting what we had already drafted was a declaration and statement of principles on healthcare professional health and well-being. And that's on our IOMSC website. If you'd like to have a little more information about it, we in addition have different actions and policy implications about supporting the health and well-being of healthcare workforce. We actually had a consensus group of thought leaders from large healthcare organizations, institutions like Vanderbilt and others, and put forth some criteria that make sure let's take care of the healthcare workers first so that they can help take care of patients and others in society. And these recommendations were then acted upon, and a lot of these organizations have implemented new, updated occupational health and safety policies as a result of that. Other areas who expressed interest in is artificial intelligence and occupational cancer and artisanal mining and small mining. You're going to hear more about that. So Dr. Tedros is very much actively involved around the whole issue of healthy workplaces. His quote here, health does not begin in hospitals and clinics, but starts in our homes, streets, communities, schools, and workplaces. Health systems can't continue to treat people and send them back to the same working conditions that made them sick. So they have now a whole new vision for workplaces and workplace health, focusing on health promotion, health protection, disease prevention, being able to focus on where people receive their health services to perform their jobs so that they don't have to just get sick and injured because of their work, and then being protected in case of public health threats, like we obviously saw with the COVID pandemic, and then opportunities to enhance their physical and mental health and social well-being. This whole area of mental health focus, as you can see in some of the details on this slide, and these slides will be available to you. I know there's a lot of detail here that I don't want to go into, but it's very robust and well thought out in terms of the strategic plan for WHO and all of us as a collaborating center. So with that, I will turn it over to Dr. Heron and let him talk about the ILO and WEF. So thanks, Ron. Really, I'm just going to keep the detail very light indeed, but just to say we're looking at multiple opportunities for global collaboration. So I've been fortunate to take a role with the World Economic Forum as an expert advisor on workplace health and organizations for the past 18 months, and that gives me an opportunity to meet with ministers, some ministers of finance and health, who are looking at some of these existential health issues around the world. They're based in Geneva, as are the WHO, as are the International Labour Organization. So what this gives us the opportunity to do is to bring some of these common agendas together and look at how IOMSC can support them. So rather than having to do different things with different groups, it's how do we really make the work we're doing together work for each of those big global organizations. So in Marrakesh, where they had the ICO meeting recently, that's the triennial three-yearly meeting of the ICO, there were representatives there of the ILO, Manal Azi, who looks after health there, and I've also met with her boss, Joachim Nunes, who's based in Geneva, and we'll be meeting with them again at the end of the month. We were fortunate enough to be working together on a shared platform in Saudi Arabia earlier this month in Riyadh, and again looking at how can we collaborate more closely together. So you'll hear a little bit about the artisanal mining project, but that's something that ILO are particularly interested in. So being able to discuss that with the leaders of the International Labour Organization, and then look at contacts in country, the ILO contacts in country, that we can collaborate with, we start to build these coalitions to actually drive some of these agendas forward, which is fantastic. So that's with the International Labour Organization. I'm sure you're aware, but also one of the things that they have done in the last couple of years, 18 months really, is to move one of their ILO conventions really into an expectation of all ILO members, that healthy work is a human right, is a human right, and what that means is that those governments are obliged, they don't have to say when they're going to sign up to a convention, they are already obligated by being an ILO member to demonstrate what is their plan to demonstrate why health at work is a human right, how are they fulfilling that plan. So I think what you can begin to see is we are involved in some of these great big global organizations who are trying to drive progress for workers in terms of healthy workplaces, and the International Labour Organization is the one. The World Economic Forum, again it's an NGO, a non-governmental organization, with some very similar goals in terms of improving human health and improving economies. So again, we have our representatives working with them and taking every opportunity to share a platform, to share dinner as well, so that we can have some of the informal conversations where many of the actions are actually agreed, and in other cases where we signed a memorandum of understanding with some organizations so we can collaborate more closely together. So more detail, if you want it, really, on the website, and if anybody wants to ask any questions about how we're doing that, please do. Thank you. Thank you, Richard. Could I pass that? I think Peter's going to go to the podium. Yeah, Peter. I've got a couple of slides. And then we'll bounce off again. Yeah. Thanks very much, and welcome to everyone. We're delighted to be here this morning, and thank you for joining us. I just want to make a few brief comments. Just in March of this year, I attended the 16th Indonesian Occupational Medicine Update, and they have a tremendous collaboration and a great meeting each year, and I think we're just talking about this as an example of an opportunity for collaboration and showing support internationally through IMSC to individual organizational meetings, and I presented there previously in Bali in 2019, just before the pandemic, and as I said, it's an example of opportunity for international collaboration and to move forward with these sorts of projects that we're keen to advance, and so the purpose for mentioning this one was for you as the audience to potentially think about if you're having meetings or conferences where you would like us to present or to at least welcome your members there, if you're a member of the IMSC. So it's a great opportunity, I think, that was part of our strategic plan, and just a brief comment there, Dr. Astrid Solis-Tomo, the IOMO president, has been a great supporter and advocate for the IOMSC over many years now, and again, as an example, at this meeting, in terms of the methodology for advocacy and moving forward the sorts of plans and projects that you may want to develop in your own countries, so they had representatives, the Indonesian Medical Association, the Minister for Manpower, the Minister for Health, and so we provided them with an update about our actions and our strategic intentions. And briefly on that, I'd just like to mention the project for artisanal and small-scale mining. We have developed a proposal for this because we know that there is an enormous need globally in terms of the risks and hazards faced by people operating these small-scale mines with often no governance and terrible health and safety conditions, and where this proposal that we've developed, we have discussed with a number of the major mining companies to hopefully give us support through the ICMM, the International Collaboration on Mining, and we're getting some very positive feedback on that. So really just a couple of examples of the kind of opportunities for you as members to collaborate and think of ways that we can advance our shared goals. Thank you, and I'll hand over to Dr. Spanid. Thank you, Peter. Welcome, everybody. Over the years in IOMSC, we've looked at how can we share the knowledge that we have in all our member societies. From that, we built two toolkits, which you can find on the website. One, how to build an ACOM, if there is a country where you don't have that many OCDocs, and you can use that. And the other one is how to work with legislation. So if you're in a country, how can you convince your government for better legislation and implementation of that? Through the years, we thought we have to coordinate that better. So we formed an educational committee, and Marianne Kluren is our chair. Please give us a little bit of an update on... Careful. Work exhibit. Hi. So we have a new education committee. I'm Marianne Kluren from the University of Maryland School of Medicine. We've had a pretty busy year. We've had just one meeting of the committee, but we've had a lot of meetings of kind of subgroups working on projects. I'm going to control this, actually, because I put animation in, and that means, like, it's, you know, you know how it is. Okay. So the things that we have done, we are thinking about. We haven't actually tried cataloging, you know, available free online education. You know, we've identified some sources and some resources for that, but actually kind of curating the materials out there is a pretty big project, but that's one of our to-dos. One of our goals, which the main project that we're focusing on will help us move toward this goal, is to develop a network of international Achmed specialists with attention in low- and middle-income countries where there may not be Achmed societies yet. So, you know, we're trying to build a way for people that are practicing Achmed at a specialty level in countries where they don't have a lot of peers to help them kind of collaborate with each other, collaborate with us, you know, maybe do some research together, definitely do some education together. And then toward that goal, and also working in collaboration with Workplace Health Without Borders, which has been, if you're not familiar with it, you should look it up. It's a fabulous organization, provides lots of free occupational health education, occupational health and safety, including occupational medicine. But we have a goal of kind of pushing out a local mentoring, kind of a peer mentoring project. So as we develop Achmed specialists, we're hoping that as they develop educational projects that they might be available to those that don't have Achmed training pathways in their country to be able to lean on somebody with expertise to help figure out, you know, what to do. So a lot of moving parts. And then the main thing that we've been focusing a lot of efforts on is something that we're calling Global Grand Rounds, which is a mutual occupational medicine training project, mutual education project. I hope that all of you will come to the session after this in here, because you'll get a lot of details about that, and we'll actually be calling on you to help us plan it. It's kind of a working meeting. Progress. We do have a small grant from my university's Center for Global Engagement, which has provided support from one very part-time research assistant. Is Chidima in here? Where are you? I thought she was going to be in here, and, yeah, she'll be in our session, but Chidima is a graduate of Dr. Shadi Omokodion's program in Nigeria, and Chidima is planning to go into an Occupy Med residency program. We had, I said, our initial meeting, whoops. We have a signed memorandum of understanding with Workplace Health Without Borders to collaborate in developing this. We did have a brainstorming session, a virtual brainstorming session, which had, I think, about 40 African Occupy Med specialists. Although the goal for this project is to provide international education and eventually replicate it in many other regions, we had to start somewhere, and we're starting with Africa. And we had meetings at ICO just a few weeks ago with the presentation, poster, networking meetings with a lot of fun. I captured a lot of contact information. And then today we're having a workshop session. So what is it actually going to look like? This is a little bit busy, but this is the poster, actually, from ICO. So this was presented at a poster presentation. I want you to pay attention to the lower left corner, like what the heck is this that we're doing? Basically, we're pulling together a team that will include an African Occupy Med specialist, an Occupy Med resident, who will typically be from a more developed country because those are the only countries that have Occupy Med residencies, and then somebody from our core faculty team to help coordinate it, to develop a presentation together that would be case-based. And a case can be either a workplace or a worker issue of broad international interest, so it's not like how to do driver exams in Zimbabwe, you know, because that's not going to be broadly relevant, and appropriate for novices. So our target audience for these sessions is going to be the people that are providing care to workers but maybe don't have, haven't had formal Occupy Med training and don't have access to it. And then these sessions will be presented virtually with recording, with access to translation options, and promoted widely via our various professional networks. We probably will need help from you all to identify who are the doctors that are taking care of workers who are not the docs that are coming to these meetings, right? So it's a kind of ambitious project, and we look forward to working with you all on it. I think it'll be a lot of fun. And we call it mutual education because, you know, Occupy Med residents in more developed countries don't really have access to, they don't encounter the kind of Occupy Med, the Occ Health problems that we see in low and middle income countries. So I think that the residents in developed countries can learn a lot, you know, that they're not really learning, you know, in their own countries anymore because there's not that much hazardous, you know, industry. And then the residents' role will be to help pull together and do a lot of the background work and, you know, pulling together the presentation. So I'm hoping it'll be fun. All right. Turn it over to Herman. Give you back your double mic, double mic situation. Can you put the next slide up? Thank you, Marianne. For my home country, I've got a small example that I want to share with you. And that's what we do in IOMC. We share the good examples, the best practices. We've had declining numbers of occupational medicine doctors because everybody is retiring. So about three or four years ago, we started campaigning with social media, targeting universities, younger doctors, but also doctors who have been 20 years in their field. And they don't like the routine anymore. They like something new. And we've offered them the opportunity to just walk along with experienced people for one day. A lot of them got so enthusiastic that they changed jobs. We've made little video clips, maybe a minute, maybe one and a half minute, of those doctors and explaining why they went into occupational medicine. And it's these examples that can really help us forward. There's another example, not from my country, but international, OkDocTalks. And I really welcome you to look at that. Because then you can hear experienced doctors, why they chose occupational medicine. I think that, as Marianne said, we'll have more details in the next session. So grab some water, some coffee, and then come back in the hall after this session. Ron, can I give it to you? Or Lanre? Who's on now? Lanre. Thank you. I'm going to. Oh, you're using it. I'm going to. Thank you. I'm Lanre Ogunyemi, president of the Society of Occupational Medicine. And today is a double act that I'm going to do with my friend and colleague, Professor Stephen Nemo, who is president of the faculty. And what I'll be doing is just giving a bit of a background to a particular challenge that the UK is facing at the moment. And Steve will talk about some of the solutions that the government is considering. So to set the scene a bit more, the UK has a statistics function of the government, the Office of National Statistics, that tends to collate data about employment within the UK. This is done quarterly by sampling the whole population. Last year, the Society of Occupational Medicine decided to drill down into this, and we commissioned a global professional services company to help us look at this UK data. And some of the information that came from that exercise was quite startling. We have just under 17 million people within the UK, and of this, about two-thirds are in the working age. Now, what we then discovered was with those within the working age, unlike other countries, there has been a steady increase in economic inactivity. About one in five of those people within the working age population are now economically inactive within the UK. If one goes to before the pandemic, for about a decade previously, the numbers of people that were economically inactive was decreasing. But following the pandemic in the UK, it's been increasing, and rather than, as in other well-developed countries, going back to pre-pandemic levels of things beginning to slow down, with us, it's actually getting worse, the economic inactivity. So it's something which the government is quite concerned about. And part of the reason why they're particularly concerned about is that a huge proportion of this economic inactivity is because of long-term sickness. We do have students, carers, and other early retirees contributing to economic inactivity, but more than a third is down to people who have long-term conditions that is preventing them from going to work. And this is where, perhaps, occupational health potentially then comes in. The other issue is that with the pandemic, the profile of occupational health has risen. So the government has spotted that there's a potential for occupational health to be able to help UK PLC in terms of improving the wealth of the nation. An additional challenge is that, just like in the Netherlands, we have also been suffering from fewer people within our specialty. There was a report by the General Medical Council in 2022 that looked at how many accredited specialists were in occupational medicine, the equivalent of board-certified physicians within the US. When they looked at it, it showed an 11% decline in the numbers of specialists over the preceding three years, and we're just around the 700 number. So we have to deal with this economic inactivity, deal with the long-term sickness absence, but with fewer physicians able to respond to that. So we, in sum, and also the faculty, we have been working hard in terms of advocacy, meetings with the government, trying to get the occupational health agenda. Our ambition has always been universal access to occupational health. In the UK, their coverage is just about 50%, mainly in the big companies. But some of our advocacy, we think, is beginning to bear fruit with regards to the government being more interested in occupational health, preferring some solutions that may help. It's early days, but I will leave Steve to talk a little bit more about the solutions. Thank you very much. Thanks, Larry. So we've had challenges and opportunities in the UK. The opportunities have been that we had a good war with the pandemic, and it's raised the profile of occupational medicine to a level that we've never had before. Now I have two meetings a month with our chief medical officer, Chris Whitty, I have two meetings a month with the medical director of the National Health Service, and I have one meeting a month with the Minister for Health. These were things which were just not happening three years ago. So this is a massive, massive step forward, that we now have the ears of people and seats at tables that we've never had before. What's driving the government here is this big increase in economic inactivity since 2019, and the increase in the Social Security bill as a result of that, and the fall in overall productivity. So there are kind of two sets of initiatives that we're looking at. As Larry said, we are having issues with falling numbers of accredited specialists in occupational medicine, and the Faculty of Occupational Medicine is an academic accrediting body that sets standards, oversees training, and delivers specialist examinations. So we're different to the US, and we have a single training pipeline within the UK, which is coordinated by what's called the National School of Occupational Health. So all of our residents apply for the same training program, they're interviewed, they go through a selection process, and then they're appointed, hopefully, to their preferred provider. We have at the moment between 80 and 90 residents in total, with around 16 to 20 per year. So one of the things that's happening is we have a commitment from government to increase the number of residents by around 25% over the next five years, which will be a huge step forward. We're also introducing most of our residents train in the public sector, so most of them train in the National Health Service, with a smaller number training in industry. And it's been proposed that we have hybrid training posts now, with two employers, with a private sector employer and a public sector employer, which gives a much broader experience and also shares the burden for the funding of the training posts. So we're looking at probably somewhere between 25 and 30 of those new posts, again, over the next five years. And Landry and I had a meeting with what's called Health Education England, who coordinates doctor training within the UK. We already have dual accreditation, so you can accredit as both a family medicine practitioner and a public health medicine practitioner, and there are now discussions about being able to dual accredit in occupational medicine and family medicine, which solves a number of the problems. Many of our trainees, in fact, come from general practice. They're earning a decent salary, and they take a big pay cut to come back into training in occupational medicine. This is one of the ways of getting around that. So one of our solutions is increasing the occupational health workforce, which is certainly moving in the right direction. Back in 1948, when the National Health Service was first formed, they decided that they were not going to include occupational health, which was a massive mistake. So there is no National Occupational Health Service within the UK. Our chief medical officer, Chris Whitty, came to speak to me and Landry's predecessor as the chair of SOM about a year ago and asked us to produce a proposal for introducing a National Occupational Health Service. The proposal we made is a tiered service with basically a non-clinical, low-level biopsychosocial tier at the bottom, and OCDocs, accredited specialists in occupational medicine, at the pinnacle of the pyramid, and various referral pathways on the way up. So they've had that now for a year. We have made progress. The difficulty we've had is demonstrating the ROI to government, and we haven't entirely managed to do that, although we're generating more evidence as we speak. What we have got now is a service called WellWork, which is that lower-tier, non-clinical, biopsychosocial service, which is largely looking at MSK and mental health problems, which are 80% of what we see, and we've had £400 million invested in that, so really very large sums of money for us. The other proposal, which is almost coming to fruition, is small and medium-sized enterprises within the UK traditionally don't have access to occupational health. Larger industries do, and it's been recognised that rolling out a service to them is likely to produce substantial economic benefits. So Lannery and I are both on a national task and finish group working with the Ministers for Health in producing that occupational health framework, minimum service, national occupational health service for small and medium-sized enterprises. That should conclude at the end of July and be implemented. We have a general election coming up in November, so our current Conservative government are trying to spend all the money so that the next Labour government don't have any money to spend. So they're committing to things like this, so this is massively in our favour at the moment. So we have those two strands towards our tiered occupational health service in place and we're going to continue doing what we do, which is knocking on people's doors, not taking no for an answer, and being very, very noisy with the politicians, but that's the point we're at at the moment. Thank you, it's great to hear the advocacy that you're pouring on. Keep it up, and if we can help you in any way, you let us know. So before we go to questions and any general discussion items, I want to actually pop back to this slide of the four priority areas. Dr. Ivanov at WHO asked IOMSC to be involved in all four of these initiatives, and trying to again mobilise evidence base, talk about research opportunities, strategic implications, workplace health interactions, government discussions with regulatory bodies. So if you, that are IOMSC member societies, see us sending out some letter of communications in the next few months about these topics, we would ask for your engagement and input as subject matter experts, or being able to help us draw resources, pull together. And then in addition, as Peter mentioned, any of you that have your annual Occupational Medical Society meeting, let us know if we can either, we've done presentations in person, but we've also done some by Zoom, if need be, depending on the travel situations. And if you could send a note, Julie Orting, you're here? Okay, stand up please, Julie. She's obviously the one in charge of IOMSC, and does all the communications with all of you, but send her an email. It's jorting at acoem.org. So yeah, just let us know. One other thing I wanted to, is anyone here from Japan? Because you know, talking about some of the advocacy and then the regulatory changes, it's been amazing. Japan as a country, and from their government perspective, was very concerned about the aging population, and the aging workforce, and fewer numbers of workers available, you know, to help provide the economic infrastructure of the country. And so they actually put in place a requirement, a regulatory requirement, for any employer that has 50 or more employees, an occupational health provider, on a consulting basis even, is required to give one annual exam to all employees. So that has caused a boom in the number of occupational health physicians, and Dr. Koji Mori is the president of the Japan Occupational Medical Society, but he's also the president of the University for Occupational Environmental Health Training. And they're doing some fantastic things. Part of which was that the Tokyo Stock Exchange and the Ministry for the Economy and Trade and Industry came together to sponsor employer health awards and recognition and put those employers in a preferred stock fund so that investors realize these employers are investing in the health and safety and well-being of their workforce and tend to have better bottom line outcomes as profitability as the company. So it's fascinating. They now have over, I think it's 3,000 employers that have received that recognition and it's making a huge difference in the support of occupational health. So how about anyone have any questions or comments? Warner. Great, great work, great presentation. Just wondering about if y'all have collaborated with the CDC's Global Health Division and the reason I ask is back in 2013, they sent me and a few other folks over to spend a couple weeks in Kenya to help build the system in the hospitals for TB screening of healthcare workers and blood-borne pathogen exposure. I think the Global Health Office of CDC has sites in 70 countries and if you're not already collaborating with them, they do some really good work, especially on the infectious disease control side of the health improvement. I know that healthcare personnel health is I think the top priority. Okay, good, well send me the information about their contact information. Thanks, will do. Hi. Hi, I'm Mark Leffer. Just sort of had a question about you as an international doctor group, especially collaborating with WHO, how to stay apolitical? I mean, the first facetious question is, so when Dr. Rasey's helicopter went down yesterday, was that a work-related injury? But I mean, but more serious, especially with, I mean, Gaza, with all the doctors that have been killed and aid workers that have been killed. In general, have you thought about how to stay apolitical through that? I mean, especially teaming up in some sort of things with WHO or just, you're gonna sort of keep head down and say, international, like med and not sort of deal with the questions that are gonna come to you as being international doctors? Well, I could almost say they're more fearful of collaborating with other people than we are with them. We, within our constitution, we've got specified groups that we will not associate with, for a start. So that's within our constitution. The WHO, as a non-governmental organization, historically have been very slow at collaborating with anyone who's not public sector. But what they've recognized is that, actually, if they're gonna make change happen within countries, they really have to start working with private sector, industry, and other bodies. So they're beginning to open up, and that's been over the last two to three years. They have a group called Health and the World of Work, which we've been participating on, meeting probably once a month, looking at identifying examples around the world where organizational health interventions have made a difference to the worker health and also to the economic outcomes. In a sense, they're as independent as you like. They're just examples that are there. So I've had one publicized with them where there was investment in public health infrastructure for field epidemiology and contact tracing in terms of infectious disease outbreaks, and that was sponsored by a company. So you're putting things in, and you're also putting your conflicts of interest in transparently, and then it's up to those who read them to decide. So I think that's how we've taken it. We're not exactly in bed with them, but actually it's a great way of defining a shared agenda. Of course, the World Health Assembly, United Nations, you've got multiple countries contributing over time to what those priorities are. It's not just the WHO isn't just a body of people sitting in a room. It's, as is the ILO, the same sort of thing. So we've tended to work with organizations that are already very, very diverse in their constituency. I guess that's the way we mitigate that risk. Yeah. Thank you. I'm Obidaya Elekimo. I'm a consultant occupational physician based in the UK, but I was born in Nigeria and have a lot of interest in the development of occupational health, occupational medicine in Nigeria. Now, what we have in Nigeria at the moment is that we have very few number of occupational medicine specialists. Part of it was born from the fact that traditionally we didn't have any faculties of occupational medicine as part of the training system. Currently, we're trying to do that through both the West African College of Physicians and the National Postgraduate Medical College. Unfortunately, they haven't got the critical mass to be able to carry out the training. What I'm saying in essence is that they haven't got the specialists in occupational medicine. There appears to be some level of confusion about the understanding of occupational medicine. So they have people who are public health trained, but without significant input of occupational medicine training. And unfortunately, they think that public health is exactly the same as occupational medicine. So that is making it difficult to sort of have a credible program whereby we can have occupational medicine people, doctors being trained as occupational medicine specialists. It has been a big battle in trying to educate them, in trying to come to some sort of reasonable sort of point whereby we'll be able to develop a curriculum that is fit for purpose. So one area, so I'm happy that the IOMC is very keen on this global perspective of education and especially looking at occupational medicine training. So the question is, how will the IOMC sort of interface with these colleges? And let us look at a way forward in terms of improving the system. The second thing here is that we, the second thing is that what I have in Nigeria was a Factories Act, which is more than 50 years old. The Factories Act, when it was brought in place, they were just looking at accidents, injuries that workers are sustained in accident or deaths. But what I forgot is that occupational medicine, occupational health is far beyond just people having injuries. And in fact, the sort of thing they were looking at, those are no longer very common things in terms of the workplace. So the question is, how do we move away from that and embrace the global perspective of occupational health and bring to fall changes that will enable the Nigerian government as a nation to recognize occupational health and introduce and implement occupational health in the nation? One of the steps we took going back to about six years or seven years ago, we sort of went to, we discussed and drafted the Health and Welfare Bill with occupational health and safety as a core of that in terms of how that can improve from Factories Act that they've had for over 50 years. Unfortunately, due to very strong political reasons and will it never got far. In fact, it was never read. So we are frustrated and it's still there. So my request here today is how the IMS get involved in supporting us in terms of how to get a Nigerian government to sit with us and actually understand the relevance, importance of such a bill and see whether I'll be able to get something that is placed that will form the bedrock of occupational health and occupational medicine training and practice. Can I perhaps? Go ahead, yeah. Thanks for the comment and we'll have to move on to get one or two other questions in front. There's a few people before we close but I think there's a few things. We have written to the Nigerian government in the past. We've actually produced letters to talk about the value of occupational health. However, that's just a small thing. I think there's a focus on training at a much more basic occupational health service level which is about getting everybody some access to some occupational health support, that sort of training. One thing we haven't done, I think, is to talk about the value of the occupational health specialist in terms of return on investment and outcomes. That's what training is about. So I think you've made us think, Obedair, as you do, and I think there's some questions for us in the education group and in the leadership group that we will take away. We can't answer you today, but I think let's take those away. I clearly understand that, but I think it's quite an important point that the IOMC has to think about how to support the societal, occupational and environmental positions of Nigeria. That's the only body that currently is able to talk about. I'm also thinking there's real parallels in the Middle East, for example, where, again, in many of the Gulf countries, they believe that the public health service is the same as the occupational health service, and it's not. So these are public health physicians who are not really understanding occupational health interventions at all. So I think there is a role for us to do this, which is not limited to Nigeria either. It's a much wider issue, of which you share the same issue there. Yeah, we appreciate it. Let's take a point. I'll just make just one last point, okay? The other thing I want to talk about is that for us to be able to train people, basically, on the ground in Nigeria in terms of occupational medicine, we need to have a critical mass. We need to have the numbers. We need to have the people who have the skills and knowledge to be able to do that. Any training you're talking about would just mean less exercise. Absolutely. So for us to do that, again, what I'm asking is, is it going to be possible for various countries, for example, the UK, the US, and so on, to sponsor young doctors who are very interested, and I know that there are a lot of enthusiastic Nigerians, Nigerian doctors, keen to study occupational medicine, keen to practice occupational medicine, in terms of giving them leeway to be sponsored and whereby they could come in, have a training, which will enable us to have a critical mass. So going back and such that we can have this sort of training. We just have to let one or two other people have a question, too, Obedar, but can we take it outside as well? Let's continue the conversation. We must continue the conversation, but we have three people behind you and we have less than five minutes. Please, please. Thank you. Okay. I'll be brief. Can you go back to the map of the 52 IOMC societies that you have? I was looking, I was born in Rwanda, I'm Rwandan-American, and I went to medical school, and I was teaching in medical school, and I went to University of Chicago and became a professor at Florida International University for 20 years, and I went to Kuwait University for eight years. So in that process, I've been part of a team building a school of public health in Miami and then in Kuwait, and I was in charge of developing a program of environmental occupational medicine in both, I mean, in both countries. When I'm looking at this, how do we get to help? The gentleman before me talked about, you know, the trainings. We provide all these trainings. Can we come up, I'm trying to find some international accrediting body where we can use it so we can attract people to come in and then get something, because, yeah, the case of these trainings, but then, I mean, I'm an online teacher. I've been teaching with Medical College Wisconsin for the last 10 years, and I've been to Wisconsin. I live in Miami, and I was in Kuwait, so it's too cold, and I love the hot weather. So it can be done, but if I can really be creative here and then try to solve these problems, because we have the technology. So thank you. Thank you, and rest assured, you know, we share the passion, and one of the reasons our first committee is this education committee to talk about how to answer and address some of these issues, but keep this in mind. Our organization is still growing and is not financially well-resourced. So we, our interest and our passion and such, it spans beyond what we have the resources to provide right now. I could add something practical to that, too, though, which is very, very quickly. So what we're also doing is we're connecting people with each other who do other things. So, and I think there's a fundamental piece on this accreditation that is very difficult, very difficult. Doing the online training is great for taking people through an examination process, so they get a ticket which says, I've taken this test on this day. It's not necessarily a replacement for experiential training with a supervisor and feedback, and some of the things that you get on a residency program. Residency programs are very expensive and very involved, whereas preparing people for an examination is less expensive and quite practical. So, so, so let's take that outside, but we are trying to. We've got two more questions and about two minutes left in the session, so. Good morning, and thanks for the presentation. I am aware that India is a part of your member organizations as well. I am Dr. Biswati Pearl. I am the National President of the Indian Association of Occupational Health, and I would like to offer a greater partnership in not only the educational part, but also the training parts, whatever we can collaborate. We have a basic occupational health services manual, a 418-page manual to address the informal workers in the space. So we have over 90 to 93% of the Indian workforce are in the unorganized sector. So, you know, the value of the book can be, you know, you can also take it to Africa and other places wherever you are doing the trainings. We have modules as well. So that is a part of offer that I make. The other thing is, you know. Thank you. For our national conferences and the upcoming ICO in Mumbai in 2027, I would like to see a glide path over the next two, two and a half to three years on how we can make more, you know, efforts in taking this occupational health forward as well. Thank you. Hi, thank you for a wonderful presentation. I love the list that you have here, but I see that there's a lot of countries missing, and I've always had an interest in global health, partly because I was a language major, and I think I could help out in many ways. But also, what do you recommend for somebody like me who has an interest in getting, like, Caribbean, for example, regional Caribbean countries that probably have some, you know, local unrest, but still have a need for this training? Like, what do you recommend? So that's my quick question. Maybe it's not a quick answer, but at least it's a quick question. Well, Irma or Marianne, do you want to address that? No, I just want to know how somebody like myself, who, I mean, I'm a practicing occupational medicine physician here, but can become involved and get countries that do not have this representation here to become involved. Like, I would love to be a part of the IOMSC, but I don't know, I wouldn't know where to start. You're exactly the kind of person that Marianne wants to hear more of, because we have got a number of research projects and work streams that we would really welcome enthusiastic people who are wanting to contribute to that. Marianne, do you want to add something to that? I want to say, first of all, if you have any connection with a residency program, we need you desperately, because the current project we're doing needs residency programs. I think it would be, I don't know that it's education, but it sounds like partly what you're talking about is like outreach and connection and recruitment. You know, because I was just looking up there, like Finland and Sweden are not there. Why are they not there? They've got good, strong hoc med programs, you know? So I don't know what the answer to that is. I'm not sure it's the education committee, but I think we could use some help with that. Just, thank you very much. Please do come and talk to us afterwards. Before we do close, though, I just want to make a point from the previous question, to Dr. Bish, who's the president for the Indian Association. You may be surprised, but we are already talking as an executive. We have actually met this morning. I think I'm okay to say this, but we have on our radar Mumbai 2027, which is where the next ICO meeting is going to be. We would love to work with you towards something very collaborative at that meeting on this. And I think I speak for the whole executive here, I think we can commit to doing that. And let's, I know we've got to wrap up now, but let's continue conversations in the halls and throughout the rest of the meeting. I do want people to understand one new development of IOMSC, and that is that we have become a charitable organization that should allow easier resources for funding and support of our initiatives. And it is now headquartered in London. So with that, have a good rest of the meeting. Thank you.

International Occupational Medicine Society Collaborative

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World Health Organization

International Labor Organization

healthcare workforce well-being

occupational health research

Nigeria

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