Oregon State University’s Oregon Wine Research Institute (OWRI) and LIVE held a workshop at Stoller Family Vineyards on August 4.  Shown below is the initial gathering of the group introduced by Chris Serra of LIVE.  Workshop presentations addressed monitoring vine water stress, managing wildlife with birds of prey and Total Worker Health® (TWH).  Attending were managers and supervisors from vineyards and winemaking facilities in Oregon, Washington and Idaho.

Kent Anger of the Oregon Healthy Workforce Center and Katie Vaughn described their TWH intervention for agriculture, focused on vineyards.  The program is adapted from Dr. Anger’s TWH intervention in construction project of the Oregon Healthy Workforce Center.  The new program has expanded the team-based education program on healthy lifestyles in the construction intervention project to include well-being topics such as adjusting to a new culture, time management, interpersonal communication and health care and insurance.  Such topics begin to cover some of the broad range of new issues in TWH introduced by NIOSH this summer.  Katie Vaughn is shown below describing these new topics that she developed for the vineyard project.

This is the first research project aimed at evaluating a TWH intervention in agriculture.  The project is funded by the Pacific Northwest Agricultural Safety and Health (PNASH) Center based at the University of Washington and it is supported by the Oregon Healthy Workforce Center directed by Dr. Anger, shown speaking below at the OWRI workshop.  New vineyards are being recruited to participate in the research project by Dr. Anger and Ms. Vaughn, both of the Oregon Institute of Occupational Health Sciences at OHSU.  The presentations were filmed and will be available on LIVE’s youtube channel soon.