Grant components

Needs Assessment (Step I)
 

The primary objectives of this planning grant are to:

 i) develop a needs and opportunities assessment that identifies the priority environmental and occupational public health concerns in Chile;

 ii) identify the scientific information required to support these public health needs, and;

 iii) identify the associated training and capacity building activities to support these public health needs. 

Workshop 1 

Will be held in Year 1 and will include one day dedicated to each of our three focus areas: water,
climate change, and air pollution. The days will be talks by academics and representatives of governmental agencies.  We spend breakout session time on identifying how other environmental health research needs in Chile (agricultural health, pesticides, occupational health) relate to our three focus areas. 

Workshop 2 

Will be held in Year 2 and will have two parts.
• The first part of Workshop 2 (first 2-3 days of the week), we will be a follow-up meeting to write a whitepaper on environmental and occupational health needs assessment and research agenda in Chile. This will be orchestrated and planned well in advance by the project manager. We will aim to have
participants arrive with working document drafts in hand (see above), and we will strive to have a full
working draft of the white paper before the end of the first part of this workshop. Our project manager will follow up with the author team to finalize this white paper within four weeks of the end of Workshop 2.

• In the second part of Workshop 2 (last 2-3 days of the week), we will hold an international meeting of key players from the region, including but not limited to investigators from countries with which we are already in contact, e.g., Peru, Ecuador, Paraguay, Argentina, Brazil, and Costa Rica. The objective of this meeting will be to write a white-paper on environmental and occupational health needs assessment and research agenda in the broader region (including all of the countries represented). 

Our plan is to submit these white papers for publication. As part of both Workshops 1 and 2, we will have sessions dedicate


Capacity Building (Step II)

Development of Environmental Health Educational Programs at the University of Chile. We propose to help design and teach a week long course in Environmental Health within the summer school currently conducted by the School of Public Health, to be offered in the summer following funding for this proposal. 

This course will initially be a week-long course including material on environmental and occupational health epidemiology, exposure assessment, toxicology, and environmental policy/risk assessment. This course will be a preview of the key courses designed for the masters program. Our plan is that the investigators on this grant (Steenland, Levy, Pino, Iglesias, Naeher) would both plan and teach this course.