Practice Resources

This guide is an introduction for any healthcare professional interested in rendering occupational medicine services in the United States. It was sponsored by the ACOEM Private Practice section and developed by 20 contributors—all of them occupational medicine providers; experts in a range of industries, occupational risk areas, and injuries; and members of ACOEM.

Occupational Health Guides

From ACOEM's Private Practice Section:
Occupational medicine is a subspecialty of preventive medicine that focuses on the interrelationship between the health of workers and their workplaces. Whether providers are embedded in a corporation or contracted to provide services to an employer, or they simply work in a community setting, they often find themselves evaluating and treating conditions related to their patients’ work. Through this basic guide, we aim to share with our primary care colleagues tips and knowledge from our experiences in this field. From recognizing the unique hazards of mining or agricultural work to coaching patients on returning as quickly as possible to work after an injury, we hope that our collective experience will help to broaden others’ understanding of the goals and approaches of occupationalmedicine.

This guide is particularly designed to help health care providers who juggle multiple roles find the information they need to provide work-related health services to their communities. Many providers, especially in rural areas, find themselves serving both individual patients and the companies or agencies that employ them, whether they are conducting fitness-for-duty evaluations, surveillance, evaluation of work-related injury causation, or treatment. The purpose of this guide is to help providers navigate these dual roles ethically and productively.