OEHSS

Occupational and Environmental Health Site Surveillance (OEHSS)

Purpose

We provide training and technical reach back support to the FDPMU and other organic preventive medicine capabilities on OEHSS development, sampling and analysis plans, and defining data quality requirements necessary to support health risk assessments.  

OEHSS is a comprehensive, all-hazards assessment used to identify occupational and environmental health threats at a deployment site (e.g., base camp or forward operating base). The purpose of OEHSS is to identify and evaluate potential environmental exposures that may impact the health of deployed personnell. 

OEHSS is an iterative process that documents environmental conditions that exist at the time of the assessment, identifies potential occupational and environmental health threats, guides further occupational and environmental health data collection activities, health risk assessments, and summarizes immediate or long-term risk mitigation actions necessary at forward operating bases. 

The cornerstone of OEHSS process is the Conceptual Site Model (CSM). The CSM describes all complete and potentially complete exposure pathways and is used to develop a sampling and analysis (SAP) plan to fully characterize the risks associated with complete exposure pathways.  The SAP defines why, when, where, how, how many, how often, and how long environmental sampling must be done to fully characterize health risks. The SAP ensures that the ongoing collection of environmental data will be representative of exposures to the populations at risk and provide actionable information for risk management.

EPD possesses the unique skill set necessary to effectively train and provide authoritative consultation on all components, phases, and processes of OEHSS.  This high level of training provided by EPD prepares preventive medicine personnel to produce scientifically valid and defensible recommendations.