RESPIRATORY HEALTH PROGRAM

Program Impact

NIOSH is strongly committed to program evaluation as a way to maximize its contributions to improved occupational safety and health. Regular review of program activities, outputs, and outcomes is essential to demonstrating program performance. The Respiratory Health Program (RHP) conducts reviews and shares program impact in a variety of ways.

Program Performance One-pager

The RHP Program Performance One-pager provides a glimpse of impact for our work on work-related respiratory health. Program Performance One-Pagers (PPOPs) are a snapshot of NIOSH programs’ priorities, strategies used to make progress towards priorities, recent accomplishments, and upcoming work.

Program Reviews

External expert review is one of the most valid and accepted methods of evaluating research programs. Thus, NIOSH requested that the National Academies (NA) evaluate RHP and seven other NIOSH research programs with respect to their impact, relevance, and future directions in 2005-2008.

In 2006, the National Research Council organized a Committee to review the RHP (formerly the Respiratory Diseases Research Program) with a charge to evaluate the program’s impact and relevance to health and safety issues in the workplace and make recommendations for improvement. The committee produced their report entitled Respiratory Diseases Research at NIOSH in 2008; a report brief can be found here.

RHP developed an implementation plan in 2009 in response to the NA review that reflected input from across NIOSH. It listed all the NA recommendations and it identified the highest priorities from among them. These were digital chest imaging, flavorings-related lung disease and occupational respiratory disease surveillance. The NIOSH Board of Scientific Counselors (BSC) reviewed the implementation plan and approved it.

In 2011, RHP was asked to identify highest priority recommendations from the NA review to be tracked for purposes of compliance with the Government Performance and Results Act. RHP selected the three existing high priorities, plus two more high priority recommendations to address work-related asthma and work-related chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. These 5 priority areas were endorsed by the BSC in 2011.

The BSC favorably reviewed RHP’s progress in addressing the 5 priorities in 2012. In 2014, the BSC responded favorably to a follow-up review of RHP’s work in each of the priority areas. The 2014 progress review can be found here.