Courses on Basic Occupational Safety and Health: A Train-the-Trainer Educational Program for Rural Areas of Latin America

Integrating basic occupational health services into primary care is encouraged by the Pan American Health Organization. However, concrete initiatives are still scarce. We aimed to develop a training program focusing on prevention of occupational risks for primary healthcare professionals. This train-the-trainer program was piloted at four universities in Chile and Peru. Occupational health or primary healthcare lecturers formed a team with representative(s) of one rural primary healthcare center connected to their university (N(participants) = 15). Training started with a workshop on participatory diagnosis of working conditions. Once teams had conducted the participatory diagnosis in the rural communities, they designed in a second course an active teaching intervention. The intervention was targeted at the main occupational health problem of the community. After implementation of the intervention, teams evaluated the program. Evaluation results were very positive with an overall score of 9.7 out of 10. Teams reported that the methodology enabled them to visualize hazardous working conditions. They also stated that the training improved their abilities for problem analysis and preventive actions. Aspects like time constraints and difficult geographical access were mentioned as challenges. In summary, addressing occupational health in primary care through targeted training modules is feasible, but long-term health outcomes need to be evaluated.