501 - Disruption, Health and Future of Work through a Total Worker Health Lens: Opportunities for Occupational and Environmental Medicine

Session Description: Workers and workplaces are changing. So is our vision of what worker health, safety, and well-being will look like in the years ahead. Disruptions are coming from all directions and accelerating our need to adapt to—and anticipate—change. Occupational and environmental medicine is well-positioned to help workers, employers, and society only if we are prepared to lead organizations through global disruptive influences, including climate change, how work is done in the mechanization/AI era, emerging hazards that threaten worker health, radical changes in the health of the workforce in the era of pharmacologic advances, and medical innovations that transform practice. It won't be easy. Threats to research funding, contraction of OEM physician training programs, competition, cost, and time demands on practitioners are among the factors we face. Through a montage of case studies, we will illustrate how OEM professionals can continue to lead. From sugarcane fields to oncology clinics to occupational medicine practices that have embraced Total Worker Health, we will explore opportunities for the field, and for each of us, to adapt, evolve, and stay relevant.

Educational Gaps: Traditional approaches to the practice of occupational medicine, consulting, corporate medicine, lifestyle medicine, and occupational research are being eclipsed by radical, global changes. This presentation will expose some of the disruptors that have changed what society demands of OEM professionals. It will present a framework for reexamination and adaptation, and suggest some paths forward.

The AOHC 2026 theme is Healthy workers. Healthy world: It will apply a Total Worker Health framework to understand how Occupational Medicine can promote healthy workers and healthy work in the face of global influences that threaten workers' ability to be safe, improve health, and thrive.