Project #1: Health Care Community - Pediatricians

Project Collaborators: Robert Wright, MD; Alan Woolf, MD, Director; New England Pediatric Environmental Health Specialty Unit; Kathy Kirkland, MPH, Executive Director, Association of O.

Overview:  A major organizing theme of the Center's research is exposure across the life-stage. Pediatricians, in their treatment of children, are engaged in four life stages ranging from birth through puberty: prenatal-infancy, early childhood, middle childhood, and adolescence. We are focusing on pediatricians because they engage with a vulnerable and initially fragile population, and because the nature of exposure, the toxicology of dose, and the developmental changes vary widely over the first eighteen years of life.

Pediatrician Robert Wright alking with parents.

Project Aims:

1. Present papers at the annual meetings of the Pediatric Academic Society and provide one national symposium in each of the following areas, metals, particles, organics, to the AOEC-sponsored annual meeting of the Pediatric Environmental Health Specialty Units (PEHSUs) over the five years of the grant.

2. Provide five years of podcasts and web-streamed occupational and environmental medicine Grand Rounds with Continuing Medical Education credits (CMEs) to reach urban and rural pediatricians and other health care providers.

3. Provide podcasts of seminars, when appropriate, organized by the three Research Cores and develop an archive.

4. Identify regional and local organizations with which to network around children's environmental health issues.

5. Organize local "settings for health" workshops for the Region I (New England) PEHSU to raise awareness about the settings associated with the exposures seen in the NE-PEHSU or locally, and to promote region-wide referral to the NE-PEHSU.

6. Organize and implement community service meetings at community health centers in order to bring to the community a public health-related service (e.g., measurement of Peak Expiratory Flow), to "market" the NE-PEHSU as a resource, and extend local knowledge of the Center's research and findings.