Occupational Health Nurses and Respiratory Protection: Improving Education and Training: Letter Report by Linda Hawes Clever

Author:Linda Hawes Clever
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The National Academies Press
Published: 2014-01-21T00:00:00+00:00

Challenges to Improving Respiratory Protection Education and Training

Across all levels of nursing education, the challenges in enhancing respiratory protection education and training include determining how to allocate time and faculty appropriately, identifying how to target the real-world needs of OHNs, and meeting the funding needs of the Programs in an affordable manner for students and employers. Challenges for students may include distance from programs and courses and a lack of understanding of the need or value of continuing education and training. For educators, insufficient interest or demand can present serious challenges to creating specialized courses with a narrow focus.

A major challenge faced by faculty in all nursing programs is how to allocate time in their courses and academic programs to ensure that all necessary content is covered (IOM, 2011). Additionally, decisions must be made about how to balance the importance of attaining a broad, general knowledge of occupational health and safety with including adequately detailed sections on more complex topics. Curricula at schools with occupational health nursing programs are already content rich and must cover a wide range of topics, including content on multiple types of PPE, such as hearing and eye protection, in addition to respiratory protection. At the graduate level, universities sometimes restrict the number of credit hours that a student can take per semester, which makes it difficult to add required courses without extending the time required to complete the program.

In addition to consideration of the type of content that should be taught and the level of detail that should be covered, decisions about who should teach the content can be complex. Clear distinctions cannot always be made between what content is directly within the purview of occupational health nursing in comparison to other disciplines, such as industrial hygiene and injury prevention. Interdisciplinary education offers advantages in laying the groundwork for collaborative practices (IOM, 2003), such as a close working relationship between a company’s OHN (who might have primary responsibility for fit testing workers for respirators) and its industrial hygienist (who might have primary responsibility for hazard assessment and selecting and maintaining the respirators that are used). Although interdisciplinary education offers many potential benefits, implementing this approach can be challenging and requires additional time, coordination, and planning among faculty and administrators from the various professional programs. Further, it is challenging to fund specialized faculty for small numbers of occupational health nursing graduate students.

Another challenge is that education and training programs must appropriately tailor their courses to the needs of OHNs. OHNs work in a wide range of settings and have varying responsibilities. Therefore, graduate-level and continuing education programs must balance courses so that they impart both the knowledge and the practical skills needed by their graduates. As noted in Recommendation 1, obtaining further knowledge of OHNs’ roles, responsibilities, and scope of practice in the workplace with regard to respiratory protection could provide opportunities to enhance education and training programs and help refine course content.

In addition, funding problems may exist for students and employers. Although financial support for

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