Alright, so I guess we should get started. We don't have a big crowd, but we have, that means, you know what this means. The small size of the crowd means you have an increased chance of winning one of the prizes. So there will be prizes today. Let me show off the prizes first, just to get you all excited. So we have, actually those of you who are at ICO, these should look familiar, but it's very pretty luggage tags. And so the winning team, maybe the winning two teams, depending on the numbers, win these luggage tags. Woohoo. Alright. Yeah, everybody woohoo. Alright. I'm Dr. Mary Ann Cloran. I'm talking about a project that is under the auspices of the IOMSC, the International Occupational Medicine Society Collaborative. We are considering this a mutual medical education project. This is kind of the first big project that the Education Committee of the IOMSC came up with. Nothing to disclose. I'm going to just, these are our panelists. Each of them is only going to speak for a few minutes, because what today is really about is you all working in small teams to help us develop some of the topics that we want to present in our Global Grand Rounds series. So I'm going to introduce the speakers, let them give you some of their perspectives. You know, why did we ask them to speak? And then we'll give you the instructions, we'll give you a little background on the Global Grand Rounds, and then we'll give you the instructions for breaking into teams. So I'm the chair of the Education Committee for IOMSC. I'm an associate professor at the University of Maryland School of Medicine. Herman Spanierd is from the Netherlands. He's one of the founding members of IOMSC. He's an executive board member. And he's somebody that I try to present with every year because it's so much fun. Warren Silverman is a globetrotter, a very futuristic-thinking occupational medicine physician. He spends a lot of time in a lot of countries. He's mostly in Asia. And he's on the board of directors for ACOM. He's also a leader in Workplace Health Without Borders, which is one of our partners in this project. Jamye Ghassan, I don't know if anybody heard him speak about lead yesterday. Jamye is from Rwanda. He got his medical training in Chicago. He has been a medical director, not a medical director, he's been on the faculty at University of Kuwait and also Florida International University. And he's focusing on capacity building in occupational medicine and occupational health and environmental health. And Yocham Makarabella Arias is a dear friend and I guess outgoing president of ICS OEM, right? The International Component Society of Occupational Environmental Medicine. She is an author. She is from, I'm going to get this right, Venezuela, and works in Italy. So she's kind of a globetrotter too. And I also want to introduce Chidimma Eziello, who is my research assistant in this project. Stand up and wave. Chidimma is from Nigeria. She actually was studied under one of the core faculty for our project, Shade Omokodion, in Nigeria. And Chidimma is planning to enter an OCMED residency program here in the United States. So if you're a residency director, you should chat with her and try to nab her. She's very smart. So I'm going to step out of the way and turn it over to Herman for him to tell you a little bit about his perspectives on what we're trying to do here. You can sit if you want or you can stand. No, I like standing. Yeah, these are the beautiful tulip fields in my country and I hope you'll be able to visit my country once in the month of March, April, and May. And then it's very beautiful. Yeah, I think education is very important for all of us. And one of the things I've been on the board in my country, we've got about 1,800 occupational medicine specialists. And I've seen declining numbers for the past two decades. And then three years ago, we really thought of a strategy, how can we turn that into growing numbers again? And we succeeded through a couple of initiatives, campaigning at the universities, the young doctors letting them contact their peers and hear, are you happy where you are now as a GP or as a specialist? Some of them after five years or 10 years. And that has resulted in people changing jobs and actually looking at occupational medicine. Oh, that's interesting. We made it very practical. So through those contacts, we said, okay, ask your management and if you need the support of the professional organization, we will give that support to have somebody just go along with you for a day and see what is the life of an occupational medicine doctor. Because that's the only way you can read about it and think, oh, that's nice. But if you just are there for a day or sometimes longer, but usually you can't afford more than a day, you need your boss to say, okay, I'll give you a day. That really helped. So make it very practical and then it actually works. Tangible numbers. We have our annual meeting next week. Normally out of the 1,800 members, we would have about 600 members. So let's say a third to a quarter. Three weeks ago, we were at the level that we're used to, 550-600. I had a deal with a publisher to make a present for all the participants, a book on, recently published book on ethics on insurance medicine and occupational medicine. Really nice book. The publisher was interested and I said, okay, let's do 600 because then we've got 50 spare copies. Two weeks ago, I got the secretary of our annual conference saying, we have a slight problem. We have 700 applications. I said, okay, well, I'll phone the publisher and say if it's already got in print or if we can do that. Oh, that was okay. And they congratulated us with the success. Then the moment I got on the plane, I had to make a phone call because we reached 800. So out of these initiatives, we have tangible results and there's a lot more young doctors. So the perspective that we had, you know, this is a declining specialism. I'll be the last one who will turn down the light and then it's done. Finally, it's turned over. But this was the perspective that we had for 20 years. So I'm really happy to share that with the educational committee. Just a few other things that we did. Those who changed their job from, at the moment, I have in training a surgeon who was 20 years a surgeon, a woman of 50 years old. She wanted to have more time to spend with her daughter. That's possible in our profession. Two oncologists, the most beautiful and most complex medical job there is. They were fed up with the hospital and the system, et cetera. Anesthesiologist and a couple of GPs. They have made little videos and I'll share that with you and you can put it on the website. Even if it's in Dutch, you can see that it's like a minute. And then in that minute, you hear somebody enthusiastically about this profession. Okay. A little longer than you want. Thank you. Warren, you're up. Can you guys hear me okay? No more than two minutes. I just want to give you, I'm going to focus on the African project right here that we're talking about. Can anybody hear? No. It is on. It is on. Hello. Do you want to change and sit here? Or maybe... This is on, right? Yes. But you can't hear me? No. Okay. I'm going to focus in on just looking at the way futuristic think about this Africa environment just to give you an idea of the way maybe your thoughts might want to change gear. So, if we look at the continent of Africa, thanks. Okay. The economic drivers on a global scale after World War II, U.S. was a big driver. It shifted to Europe, later to Asia. Between 2050, 2100, Africa's going to be the economic engine globally. Now, there are a lot of reasons for that. It's projected that up to 21% of the arable land in Africa is going to disappear because of global warming. It means a mass urbanization. Projections are 2050, doubling of population in urban centers. 2070, a tripling. As a result, everybody's looking at the resources of Africa. We talk about China coming in, but actually there's going to be a lot of competition for resources from Europe and from other places. On top of that, if we look at North America and Europe, there's going to be mass automation and AI, loss of jobs, and you're going to see workforces get smaller in the manufacturing field, which means that that urban population in Africa is going to have a lot of educational resources come into it, a lot of skill resources come into it, and there's going to be a lot of investment. Money is pouring into organizations like the Bank of Africa right now from all over the world. Investment is going up dramatically. I'm a medical director for a large paper company in North America, 250 paper plants. They asked me about their employees. Paper plant might have 250 employees. I've told them in 10, 15 years, you're only going to have five people at that plant. I said, so take all your equipment and bring it down to Africa where they import all the paper right now. They've got the trees, they've got the resources. It's the place to be. That means that the occupational medicine world is going to expand, and that's why we have to put our time and effort into developing that, coordinating that, and it has to be mutual, back and forth. We need to learn about the issues in the rest of the world. Having communication is going to be important. You're not going to be, hi, my name is Dr. So, I'm from Liberia. It's going to be, hi, my name is Dr. So, and I go all over. I'm a global doc. The one problem we have to be careful about is brain drain. We train a doctor in Africa, and then they come to Europe or they come to the U.S., so we have to figure that problem out, too. Those are all issues that we may want to talk about. Thank you. I am using this opportunity to tell you that I'm working on this Global Applied Prevention Center. I accumulated experience and call myself a capacity-building expert because I was part of a team that built a school and department of environmental occupation. I'm in Coit University, and my last assignment in Middle East was an occupational environmental medicine program that I built. They wanted to use TOT, training of trainers. So, what we would do, now they accepted my syllabus. In November, we're going back to Coit, and I promised that I'd get an American occupational medicine doctor, a UK occupational medicine doctor, and a South Korean medical doctor because I want all those perspectives, because in the end, the ones have to create their own programs. Then, what we do, we teach their occupational health physicians and occupational health consultants, and then we give all the material they need. We have this technology we're using, using teams. We embed, now, a model into it, and we can give live lectures and then provide discussion forums. Once we do that, we leave everything to them, and we're going to train primary care doctors and then the family physicians. So, I believe if we can leverage the technology and make sure we have partners on site, and I was talking to Dr. Richard Heron a moment ago about this, and we can have partners in the field, and then we teach online, and then you can negotiate a place to do the residency. I think that's the approach. So, I'm hoping you'll join me in my effort. I'll be sending to you all I'm working on, and let's do it. Thank you. Thank you. I think I can speak with this microphone. First of all, I want to acknowledge Professor Clorane for your hard work. Thanks to you, we're here. I have had the privilege of working with her for a couple of years, and she's amazing. And I have to tell you a secret. Warren is coming from the future, so he knows, he knows things that we don't know. Since we have only a few minutes, I just want to focus on communication. The world has changed. I'm the president of the International Component Society of the AECOM, and I have been involved in international work since probably I was a teenager. I worked for a charity foundation that is called LDOH that produced educational material. So, we have a great opportunity now with communications. Dr. Clorane has been having a lot of challenges with the time zones, because organizing 20 time zones, it's very challenging, but we can make it. In the past, if people wouldn't take an airplane, it was impossible to meet. Now we have Zoom, Google Meet, Teams. We have a lot of platforms to get together, number one. Number two, we have social media. The power, we cannot underestimate the power of social media. We can spread the knowledge, and there's a lot of people out there that need our words. They need to get inspiration, ideas, knowledge, and I'm sure that each of you here have wonderful ideas to share your expertise, your knowledge. So, don't be afraid. The average people that use TikTok are from 40 to 50, so it's not for teenagers. I know there are some issues with social media prejudice, but for example, Dr. Mao, you can follow him. He's an internal medicine doctor, obesity specialist, and he is in the New York Times, because unfortunately, most of the influencers of the world are not health professionals. So, like Oprah Winfrey or other communicators. So, we have a great opportunity to communicate better, to be fun. We cannot be bored, bore our audience. People lose attention in three seconds. So, this is my invitation to collaborate together and use the powerful tools that we have right now. Thank you. Thank you. All right, I'm going to give a quick background. Now you know a little bit about us and where we're coming from. I'm going to give a little quick background of the project, and then we're going to break you into groups, and we're going to try to distribute you among the groups so that we have some representation from the different kind of key roles in this project, which you will learn about in a sec. So, 2023, there was a new education committee of the International Occupational Medicine Society Collaborative. We partnered with Workplace Health Without Borders. The primary goals are to increase access to quality Occ Med education around the world free, ideally free, and support the development of OSH disciplines and professions in low and middle income countries. So, we're focused on occupational medicine, but the training that we're going to be developing, we will be making it available to all OSH professionals and, you know, welcome them to be involved in it as well. I just want to acknowledge Workplace Health Without Borders, IOMSC, my own university, which has supported this. The projects that we've been, we're trying to collate and curate, you know, available online education. It's a little bit hard. We're trying to build a network of providers. We are working on mentoring project and train the trainer so that as we develop expertise, those experts will then pull others up and train them. And then what this mostly is about is the Global Grand Rounds Initiative. And thank you, AI, you helped us with our logo. The mission is to develop an international collaborative educational program connecting residents who are typically going to be training in more developed countries globally with Occ Med experts from low and middle income countries to deliver education on caring for workers in low and middle income countries with the goal being education that will be accessible and appropriate for non-specialists. So this is not, this is not educating each other about the latest immunology related to, you know, silica fibers and which parts of the immune system. This is more practical. What do the docs caring for the workers really need to understand so that they're doing the right thing, so that they're recognizing hazards, so that they're protecting people? Our vision is a global network unifying us all, basically. And we're hoping that this will lead to research collaborations, increasing all of our skills and knowledge, and, you know, work toward advancing education on a global scale. So, you know, we're thinking kind of big. The potential audience is everybody that you see in this circle here, right? So, Occ Hygiene, Occ Health Nursing, Safety, Ergonomics and Engineering, and maybe even the worker. You know, some of this might lead toward education for workers, primary care. The Global Grand Rounds speakers will be occupational medicine specialists. The plan is to assemble a team. The team will be low and middle income Occ Med specialists, along with an Occ Med resident supported by one of the core faculty to kind of keep things on track, to develop a presentation that is case-based, a broad international interest, appropriate for Occ Health novices, and then deliver it in a virtual recorded format with support from Workplace Health Without Borders and promoting it to Occ Health professionals and clinicians caring for workers. We're going to need help from a lot of people identifying and reaching these healthcare workers that are caring for workers, but just kind of this is the paradigm that we're aiming for. This is not esoteric. This is very basic. And the education is going to be free. We also need to pay attention to translation and make sure that we have the ability for people to speak in their own language. And so, you know, many of the countries, we're going to start with Africa, but, you know, many of the countries there, French is the main language, and so what we may be doing is having presentations in French, you know, that us dominant English-speaking people have to, you know, deal with the translation, so we're going to try to make it fair and accessible. The ultimate goals are that we're going to have a group of people that are, you know, working together to change legislation and policies globally that will have effective worker protections, but this is kind of we're hoping to build this. So for this session, let's get onto the meat of it, you're going to help us plan some of our sessions. We're going to start with Africa. The education is going to be available worldwide, so people from, you know, South America, people from Asia, people from North America, etc., can all participate in the training sessions, but we're starting with like kind of building the faculty in Africa first. I would like you, you're going to be, we're going to be organizing you into small groups. Ideally, each group is going to include ACMED residents, I'm not sure I see a whole lot of them in here, residency directors. If we have ACMED specialists, maybe by African Union regions, and then ACMED specialists from other low and middle income countries. We're going to give you about 20 minutes to complete a template, we'll give you instructions for it, and then 10 minutes to present your ideas, and then this panel is going to judge them, and the winners get these, these fun luggage tags. So, we have four sets of four luggage tags, so let's, let's organize into groups of four. I think we have a small enough group we can do that. So remember, the topics should be broad international interest. So in each of your groups, you're actually going to try to come up with a topic and help us develop it using the criteria that we're going to give you. Appropriate for novices and case-based. Now the case could be a workplace or a worker, okay? This is a link to the template for the plan, so everybody capture that because you're going to be entering your, your answers, if you will, into this. Also think about the informal sector. It's going to be hard to solve the informal sector, but think about it. I'm going to come back to this, well actually it's up now. So some of the topics might be chemical hazards, climate change, stress or burnout, biological hazards. These are all topics that are identified in a previous brainstorming. Worker injuries, noise exposure, dust hazards, and then maybe those are the kind of the broad clinical topics. Maybe we should be also thinking about populations. So mining, petroleum industry, healthcare, manufacturing, construction, transportation. All of those are fair game. All right, and agriculture, of course. So I'm going to keep that up and if you're a residency director or a resident, please stand up. Or if you're connected to a residency program, that would be you, Louis. Who else? Stand up if you're a residency program. Okay. All right. So each of you move to a different corner of the room. Okay. And Geneva, can you help me with the hand? She's a professor. You can tell. Each of you move to a different corner of the room. Okay. Now, um, an Achmed specialist from an African country. Stand up. Achmed specialist from an African country. Even if you're working in a different country now. If you, um, okay, wonderful. Go join one of those groups. Ideally, we want you distributed. Okay. You can go hand out. Start handing out things. Yeah. Um, Achmed specialist from another country. Um, any, any other country other than the U.S. because we've got a lot of U.S. people here. All right. Go join a group. Yes. Try to distribute yourselves. Pam's standing back there with nobody with her. She needs some people. So Pam, wave, wave. Okay. Pam's up. Okay. And then, how many do we have in each group? Oh, we got three here. All right. So tell me something about, who's in the corner back there? What do you guys do? All right. Just join a group. Join a group. All right. So the template, the template is what you would enter your information about. The instructions are coming around. Each of the faculty is going to come join a group and go through the instructions with you. All right. It's time. Who wants to go first? You got one minute to pitch it and we're judging you. We're judging you harshly, harshly, I say. We have a rubric. No, I'm only kidding. We're not going to judge you harshly, but we are going to have to judge the ideas a little bit because we have to give the prizes to some group. And I know how much you want the luggage tags. So who wants to go first? You guys ready? All right. Everybody pay attention. This is, do you want to, oh, you can use this. No, actually, this way. Here, Kurt. Come here. I just wanted everybody to see you. Kurt. What? Here. Okay. Before I start, I wanted to- You have one minute. One minute.

Global Grand Rounds initiative

International Occupational Medicine Society Collaborative

mutual medical education projects

low and middle-income countries

occupational medicine

strategies for increasing interest

future of occupational medicine in Africa

global education and capacity building