The fundamental mission of Purdue's Agricultural Safety and Health Program is to enhance the quality of life of rural residents of the state, especially farm families, through assisting them with making their homes, work places and communities the safest and healthiest possible places to live and work. It is further believed that this program has the capacity to impact rural safety and health on a national and international basis through influencing public policy, preparation of future rural safety and health professionals, demonstration of effective intervention strategies, development of new knowledge and dissemination of resources.
Activities associated with the Agricultural Safety and Health Program have been categorized into three areas:
The primary emphasis of the program over its more than 55 years of existence has been the prevention of rural and agricultural-related injuries. More recently, efforts have also been made to address the more common types of occupational illnesses associated with agricultural production. Reducing the incidence of injury and disease among the target population has the greatest potential for long term benefits and reduces the need for investments into the remaining two program areas.
The desired outcomes from program activities in the rural emergency preparedness area are: greater public awareness of the severity and impact of rural injuries; reduced mortality rate of injuries that are frequently enhanced due to the length of response time, inappropriate response techniques and lack of agricultural-related first response training; and increased emergency medical and rescue capability in rural communities.
Since 1979, the Agricultural Safety and Health Program's Breaking New Ground Resource Center and Outreach Program, has offered a variety of rehabilitation services to farmers, ranchers and agricultural workers who have desired to remain productive in agriculture despite severe disabilities. This area of activity has brought considerable attention to the program and has resulted in significant services being provided that have not been readily available through traditional channels. Services include: development of appropriate assistive technology, prevention of secondary injuries, on-site consultation, referrals to appropriate agencies, dissemination of a newsletter and relevant resources, peer support networking, and public awareness activities.
For the first three decades, the program thrived under the leadership of Professor F.R. (Dick) Willsey who was recognized as a premier example of the traditional Extension education specialist. He traveled extensively promoting farm safety wherever he could gain an audience. He was innovative in the use of safety plays and skits, audiovisual materials, demonstrations and dynamic exhibits. Long before tractor rollovers became a national concern, he was conducting actual tractor overturn demonstrations to illustrate the high potential for death from this type of incident. When grain bins were first introduced, he developed graphic displays demonstrating the hazards of flowing grain. In response to a lack of rural emergency medical services, he was active in promoting first aid training for farm families and later the organization of volunteer rural emergency medical units. His belief in the need for grassroots involvement led to a thirty-year involvement with the Indiana Farm Safety Council (Indiana Rural Safety and Health Council) where he acted as a catalyst for a wide range of statewide rural safety and health efforts. Throughout his tenure as Extension Safety Specialist, he maintained a strong commitment to working with children and youth. He recognized early that if changes in attitudes and behavior were to occur, it had to start with children. As a result, Purdue's Agricultural Safety and Health Program has always been heavily involved in promoting child safety and working with rural youth groups such as 4-H and FFA.
Professor Willsey and other members of the Purdue staff were also involved with attempting to better understand the nature of agricultural injuries through ongoing applied research. The results of this research were used primarily for designing injury prevention programs and in public awareness efforts. Early studies involved injuries associated with tractors, cornpickers, and other agricultural equipment and rural home-related injuries. The following is a partial listing of several of the early sponsored research projects conducted at Purdue.
In 1977, William E. (Bill) Field replaced Professor Willsey who retired the previous year. Building on the work started by Professor Willsey, Professor Field became heavily involved in coordinating and promoting local agricultural safety activities throughout the state. He sought to involve as many groups as possible in program efforts including Farm Bureau, 4-H, FFA, Extension Homemakers, insurance companies, implement dealers, and community organizations.
During the past two decades, under the leadership of Professor Field, Purdue's Agricultural Safety and Health Program has gained additional national and international recognition. Professor Field has developed both undergraduate and graduate programs that have exposed hundreds of students to the field of agricultural safety and health. His coordination of graduate level research has resulted in the awarding of 20 graduate degrees in the field and dozens of research reports and published works that have contributed substantially to the literature available to other researchers.
Professor Field and other program staff have been sought out on a consulting basis for their expertise in development of injury prevention and rural rehabilitation programs by numerous organizations and companies throughout the U.S. and Canada. Staff has provided technical and educational services for major farm organizations, 4-H, FFA, many of the major agricultural equipment manufacturers, the legal profession, insurance companies, rural hospitals, and numerous agricultural businesses.
Some of the recent accomplishments are summarized as follows:
Extensive use has been made of the farm and rural media networks to promote safer and healthier work practices. Since 1977, over 500 news releases, stories, and articles have been published, based on work done at Purdue. In addition, over 300 radio and TV interviews relating to agricultural safety and health have been conducted. This has included special reports by NPR, CNN, ABC, Market-to-Market, Ag Day, NBC, and other nationally syndicated media organizations and programs.
Several of Purdue's agricultural injury prevention materials have found wide acceptance and use with farmers and agricultural safety professionals throughout the United States. Over 700 copies of Purdue's 22 minute Agricultural Tractor Safety film have been sold across North America, making it one of the most popular agricultural safety films ever produced. The film was modified with a Spanish sound track for use in Texas and California, where there are large numbers of Spanish speaking farm workers. Suffocation Hazards in Flowing Grain, produced at Purdue, was the standard audio-visual presentation on flowing grain hazards for over 20 years, being used widely with farmers and grain handlers. (This presentation is presently being reproduced in video format.) Several of Purdue's safety publications which were designed for use with agricultural workers with limited reading skills, have been reproduced in other states in large quantities.
One of the program's most successful agricultural injury prevention publications has been Safety on the Farm, a farm safety coloring book designed for use with children and their parents. Over 95,000 copies were produced and distributed throughout the United States. The second edition of the coloring book, Careful Country Farm Safety and Activity Book, became available in 1994. Already over 70,000 copies have been produced and distributed. In addition to the coloring book, an accompanying Careful Country Teacher's Kit was produced to aid parents and educators in teaching farm safety to children. Nearly 750 kits have been purchased by safety leaders and school teachers across the country.
Presently, the program is involved with completing a series of 4-color child injury prevention publications, a video on preventing suffocations in flowing grain, a video on rescue from commercial grain storage facilities, and has just completed an Agricultural Safety and Health Program Leader's Guide.
An extensive video library has been assembled and is available for public use through the Purdue Audio Visual Library. A directory of resources is updated on a a regular basis and distributed widely to rural educators.
One of the first WWW sites on farm safety resources for children was established in 1995. This is being expanded on a regular basis to include new resources and links with other programs.
It is widely accepted that the present system of collecting agricultural injury data has many weaknesses. Presently there are fewer than 20 states that maintain and make available farm fatality data for analysis. The use of encoded data from death certificates used at the national level has major shortfalls, with nearly one-third of the cases not clearly indicating the agent involved or cause of death.
For more than 25 years, the Indiana Department of Health and Purdue have cooperatively worked to identify reports of farm-related deaths and suicides involving an Indiana "farm residents." This data has been analyzed and reported in several fashions. Two recent studies have looked at farm-related deaths involving those under 15 and those over 60. In addition, a statewide clipping service has been utilized in identifying fatal and non-fatal farm injuries reported through the press. In 1985, M.A. Purschwitz, now at The University of Wisconsin, undertook a graduate study to evaluate various methods of collecting and handling agricultural fatality and injury data. Presently, over 2,500 farm-related fatality cases have been assembled from over 30 states and entered into a database established by Dr. Purschwitz. This data was used to conduct a comparative study of farm-related fatalities involving children in Indiana and Wisconsin.
Since 1977, over 900 students preparing to become farmers, agricultural education teachers, county extension agents and agribusiness managers, have enrolled in Professor Field's agricultural safety and health class offered in Purdue's Agricultural and Biological Engineering Department. In addition, numerous workshops and presentations have been made to rural leaders throughout the United States. A wide variety of training materials have been prepared to provide rural leaders the essential tools to disseminate agricultural safety and health information. Examples of these include:
Since 1990, the program has coordinated the Rural Indiana Safer Kids Project (RISK) that has trained rural leaders to become more effective at promoting rural childhood injury prevention. This project has resulted in hundreds of child safety events and presentations to thousands of children.
Much of the earlier work done on the broad problem of "farm accidents" involved little in-depth investigation based on epidemiological approaches. After completion of the three statewide farm injury surveys completed in Indiana, the conclusion was drawn that not much has changed in the big picture and that little was still known about the nature of specific types of workplace injuries. Recent Purdue research efforts have focused on specific high risk areas as determined by on-going data collection and the evident lack of prior research. For example, as the result of the concentrated research efforts on confined space and flowing grain entrapments, more effective educational materials were developed and more meaningful recommendations were made to the manufacturers of grain storage facilities and grain transport vehicles to reduce the risk of flowing grain entrapment. Another good example was the increased use by leading tractor manufacturers of the moveable power-take-off master shield which was shown superior by a Purdue study. See section on graduate-level research for examples of recent research efforts.
Purdue's agricultural safety and health program has set a goal to prepare the very best agricultural safety and health researchers and educators possible. It is anticipated that the demand for these individuals, both in the United States and abroad, will increase as the sensitivity to agricultural safety and health issues increase. Presently, few other graduate programs in the United States offers this type of formal preparation. During the past 15 years, 15 graduate students have completed graduate-level degrees in agricultural safety and health. Seven of the graduates presently are in leadership roles in the agricultural safety and health profession in university or educational settings.
The graduate program within the Department of Agricultural and Biological Engineering utilizes disciplines outside the traditional areas of agricultural engineering to prepare strong plans of study. These areas include educational psychology, industrial safety, industrial engineering, human factors, health education, and industrial hygiene.
A summary of graduate degrees that have been awarded are as follows:
Based on Indiana data, one out of every nine farm families experiences an agricultural-related injury each year. Approximately 60 percent of these require emergency medical treatment due to burns, lacerations, broken bones, concussions, eye injuries, or exposure to toxic materials. In Indiana, this amounts to approximately 3,700 cases each year. Appropriate behavior and knowledge on the part of the first responder, whether it be the farm wife, rural law enforcement personnel, member of a volunteer fire department, or emergency medical unit is critically important to ensure the safety of the first responder and minimize the extent of injury to the victim. There continues to be, however, a lack of adequately trained emergency medical services in rural areas and few farm family members have been trained in even the basics of first aid. Furthermore, less than 15% of Indiana's rural emergency medical and resource personnel have experience with farm-related hazards which might be confronted in a serious farm accident. This places both the patient and rescuer at potential risk of injury.
During the past 15 years, Purdue's Agricultural Safety and Health Program has provided formalized training to over 9,000 emergency medical and rescue personnel. Purdue, through a contract with the Indiana Emergency Medical Services Commission, provided training for instructors to conduct agricultural emergency training at the local level. This has resulted in a group of over 50 instructors located across the state who are equipped to provide local training. In addition, efforts have been made to promote extensive first aid training to farm families and to assist them in being better prepared to respond to serious injuries. It is estimated that this group of instructors has provided training to over 8000 individuals since the program began.
For the past several years, the program has hosted several intensive agricultural emergency response workshops for instructors and other emergency response personnel. Topics have ranged from machinery extrication and high rise agricultural rescue to anhydrous ammonia leaks and grain bin rescue. The "train-the-trainer" approach has greatly multiplied the potential impact of the Purdue program efforts across the state.
In 1979, Professor Field began the "Breaking New Ground" Project at Purdue to serve the needs of farmers with disabilities who desired to remain active in their farm operation despite their physical limitations. Since 1979, the project has responded to over 20,000 requests for technical information and has regularly published a newsletter which now goes to about 11,000 individuals. Over 100 workshops for farmers and rural rehabilitation professionals have been held throughout the United States and Canada. Two resource manuals were published containing over 700 pages of ideas to make the return to farming following a disability easier and safer. The single most frequent cause of disability of those contacting the Breaking New Ground Project continues to be traumatic injuries.
The Breaking New Ground Resource Center has become a widely recognized source of material related to rural assistive technology issues and working with farm families impacted by disability. The following is a sample of resources presently available.
In addition, the Breaking New Ground Resource Center has produced 25 technical reports on specific disability-related issues that have been distributed to thousands of individuals throughout North America. These include:
Presently the Breaking New Ground Resource Center works in partnership with the National Easter Seal to provide leadership to the USDA AgrAbility Program. This involves providing resources to the 21 state projects and training to over 70 staff involved with the state projects.
William E. Field, Professor
Purdue University
Department of Agricultural & Biological Engineering
West Lafayette, IN 47907-1146
765.494.1191
765.496.1356 (FAX)
field@ecn.purdue.edu
http://abe.www.ecn.purdue.edu/~agsafety
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