COOPERSTOWN, N.Y. — The Northeast Center for Occupational Health and Safety, a part of the Bassett Healthcare Network, has a mission to improve agricultural and rural health through consulting, research, education, and outreach.

Efforts and initiatives include providing respirator-fit test services, holding farm-safety trainings, CPR training, chainsaw/logging safety training, a personal protective equipment program, and a whole host of research projects.

The mission, Northeast Center Director Julie Sorensen says, is to “work with communities … to develop solutions that make their work healthier and safer.”

“We also do a lot of work here conducting research,” she notes. Some of that research includes tracking injury trends in order to develop and roll out solutions.

One such project, Sorensen says, centered around PTOs, the power take-off shafts that connect tractors to equipment, and the entanglement injuries that are too common. Although equipped with protective shields, “we learned farmers just ripped those off,” Sorensen says.

The solution was finding shields that weren’t too big and didn’t get in the way. “We found a shield that wasn’t as difficult to use and was cost efficient,” Sorensen notes. And then the Northeast Center distributed that shield to farmers. In a follow-up, the center found that more farmers were using the shield to prevent entanglement and injury.

Smaller farms, in particular, struggle with safety and health issues, Sorensen says. “Safety is tied to economics,” she says, and smaller farms just don’t have as much money to spend. The result is she’s seen everything from tractors without brakes to farming on extremely hilly and dangerous land.

That’s where the Rollover Protective Structures (ROPS) program comes into play. The program, which began in 2007, helps farmers find, purchase, and install rollover safety bars on tractors that don’t have them. Tractor rollovers are historically one of the most common causes of farm injuries and fatalities.

“That program has gone national,” Sorensen says. And since the cost to implement the program is less than the cost of fatalities and injuries from rollover accidents, the program has saved the state about $4 million since its inception.

Another program focused on the lobster industry and the leading cause of death there — drowning. “The most frequent cause of death to the lobster community is falls overboard,” Sorensen said. That was compounded by the fact that many of the lobster workers weren’t wearing life jackets. Most, Sorensen says, weren’t opposed to wearing one, but they had not found one they could comfortably wear while still performing their job duties.

The center started researching options available locally to lobster communities, and then worked to put together a variety of different life jackets and flotation devices ranging from slimly designed vests to bib overalls with a built-in flotation feature. “We brought them to the docks and the ports and asked them if they’d be willing to try them for a few weeks,” Sorensen recalls.

When the lobster workers reacted favorably to the choices, the center then took the next step and started a life-jacket van. The van traveled from port to port in Maine and Massachusetts with an assortment of life jackets and distributed about 1,200 total. Sorensen says they hope to expand the project to other states now.

The Northeast Center for Occupational Health and Safety is also wrapping up a project on sleep deprivation in commercial fishing and Sorensen hopes to undertake several new research projects including searching for solutions for tick-borne disease prevention that don’t require people to douse themselves with insecticides or repellents, researching wearable technology for cardio health in the logging community, and studying mental health in the farm industry.

The Agricultural Safety and Health Council of America recently honored Sorensen for her two decades of research and efforts to increase worker safety with the 2022 Safety and Health Researcher award.

“I’m just very lucky to be working with talented and dedicated people,” she says. The center currently employs about 30 in roles ranging from research to administrative support.

The Northeast Center got its start in the early 1980s when two pulmonologists at the Mary Imogene Bassett Hospital in Cooperstown were interested in researching health and safety issues in the farming industry. Initially known as the Bassett Farm Safety and Health Project, the state legislature officially designated the New York Center for Agricultural Medicine and Health (NYCAMH). 

The Northeast Center for Occupational Health and Safety received its current name in 1992 when it became one of seven agricultural centers designated by the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health but continues to use the NYCAMH name within New York as the agricultural community is so familiar with that moniker.