Recommendations for Program Improvement - Agriculture Forestry and Fishing Research at NIOSH - page 190

to healthcare workers are another important venue for dissemination of research
findings and intervention initiatives.
Successful projects have used clinical services, education, and on-farm safety
reviews; social marketing, electronic communication, and networking to provide
education, train the trainers, and communicate with agricultural workers; and
diverse audience-specific methods for communication with Hispanic children,
parents, and farm workers.
Improve Stakeholder Engagement and Partnerships
The path on which NIOSH embarked when given its congressional mandate in
1990 is so important that only first-class principles for engaging stakeholders will
do; anything less will make a travesty of congressional appropriation of resources.
In recent years, NIOSH has embraced stakeholders in a number of occupational
safety and health initiatives, as evidenced by the successful National Occupational
Research Agenda (NORA) and NORA II initiatives. The participatory approach
between NIOSH and stakeholders involves both parties early in the decisionmaking
process and leads to more successful outcomes for employers and employees.
Recommendation 6: The AFF Program should establish a new model to
involve stakeholders throughout the research process, and should also es-
tablish an effective multipartite stakeholder mechanism that includes at-
risk workers and other organizations to focus on occupational safety and
health.
6.a: The AFF Program should develop a new model for targeting all key
stakeholders as full participants in its research program design and execution.
The most-effective research projects have proactively involved workers through
various stages of the research process. As mentioned in the ideal research program
(Chapter 2), research must be participatory and community- or work population-
based so that there is buy-in from the AFF community and stakeholder involvement
should not be limited to the beginning and end stages. A participatory research
model would involve different target populations from the prioritization of candi-
date projects to the inception, design, conduct, analysis, publication, and outreach
of experiments and their conclusions.
6.b: The AFF Program should establish a coordinating council that would
serve as a public advisory committee and would assume lead responsibility for
informing public discourse on occupational safety and health issues. As men-
tioned in recommendation 2, this group would be critical in advising and coordi-
nating the AFF Program's efforts. The evaluation committee strongly believes that
a public advisory committee should be representative of all workers in agriculture,