NIOSH PPT Stakeholders Meeting Looks at Four Sectors
Available remotely via Live Meeting, the March 29 event will focus on PPE for health care, mining, agriculture, and public safety. Workshops will follow on March 30.
NIOSH's Personal Protective Technology Program (NIOSH PPT) and National Personal Protective Technology Laboratory (NPPTL) are holding their Annual Stakeholders meeting March 29. Free and available remotely via Live Meeting, the event is an opportunity for stakeholders to communicate directly with NIOSH employees and NIOSH grant recipients about their current research projects and activities.
The NIOSH PPT Stakeholders Meeting will be held at the Hyatt Regency Pittsburgh International Airport and will focus on PPE used in health care, mining, agriculture, and public safety. Two breakout sessions will be held for each sector.
NIOSH posted these descriptions about the breakout sessions to be held for each topic:
- Health care: PPE use and usability issues in acute care and community health care settings and the alignment of current and recommended PPT research to narrow knowledge gaps, reduce exposures, and improve health care worker proper use and compliance will be emphasized. These sessions will explore respiratory protective equipment use and application issues as well as use and application issues with other types of PPE commonly used in health care, including the use of integrated ensembles in health care settings.
- Mining: One session will focus on technologies to improve current self-contained self-rescuer (SCSR) designs and mine rescue ensembles. Presentations from researchers, manufacturers, and users will focus on SCSR design improvements and technologies to address user needs. The second session will focus on best practices learned from the fire service and design and performance requirements for mine rescue ensembles to identify existing limitations and current best practices will be addressed.
- Agriculture: Discussions will focus on designing solutions to major barriers for appropriate PPE use practices that occur in pesticide handling in agricultural crop production. Discussions will use a process flow approach focusing on each of the critical stages for PPE use in pesticide handling. Potential barriers and regulations, such as those identified from brainstorming meetings of the NIOSH PPE Surveillance and Intervention Program for Agricultural Pesticide Handlers, that may influence safe performance will be highlighted. Stakeholders will provide their input to clarify barriers and help identify solutions for future development. The goal of these discussions is to bring diverse stakeholders together to discuss barriers to appropriate PPE use and to jointly formulate and develop creative solutions.
- Public Safety: These sessions will focus on personal protective technologies applications, performance/certification standards and use related to the fire service and law enforcement communities. Two breakout sessions will be conducted, one for fire services and one for law enforcement. The fire service related breakout session will include issues and requirements related to the design, certification, inspection of structural firefighting protection ensembles and NIOSH research projects supporting the fire service use of protective ensembles and respiratory protective equipment. The law enforcement breakout session will address design and performance requirements and standards for law enforcement protective ensembles with a focus on CBRN hazards. The CBRN Protective Ensemble Standard for Law Enforcement released by the National Institute for Justice in late 2010 will be discussed.
Free workshops about three of the four topics will be held the following day but are not available remotely. Space is limited for each of the sessions and reservations are first come, first served.