Dr. Potocko has been serving in the U.S. Navy for 28 years, with a long-anticipated retirement in Nov 2022. He has studied aerospace engineering, flown high-performance Naval aircraft, deployed aboard aircraft carriers, and embedded with Marine helicopter squadrons as a Flight Surgeon.
Become an Ergonomist:
Paige Callaghan, BMSc, discusses the field of occupational and environmental medicine with Josh Potocko, MPH, MD.
Return to 'Do the Change: Reimagining OEHS'
About Josh Potocko, MPH, MD
Dr. Potocko has been serving in the U.S. Navy for 28 years, with a long-anticipated retirement in Nov 2022. He has studied aerospace engineering, flown high-performance Naval aircraft, deployed aboard aircraft carriers, and embedded with Marine helicopter squadrons as a Flight Surgeon.
As a Flight Officer-turned-Aerospace & Occ Med physician with a Neuroscience background, he has unique expertise in human performance, mishap investigation, causation analysis, toxicology, injury care, public health, and policy development.
At the moment, he is completing his career in a policy position at Navy Medicine's Headquarters in Falls Church, VA. In the near future, he will be splitting his time between academics, research, urgent care, hobby farming, trekking, diving, or recording with his band, Joe Schwa and the Scarlet Lettermen.
Audio Transcript
Paige Callaghan: Hello everyone and good morning and welcome to the first of our series, "Day in the life series". My name is Paige Callaghan, and I am very excited to be here today with Josh Potocko for our first guest on the “Day in the Life” series here at Berkeley's COEH Continuing Education. So, Josh, thank you so much for being here and how are you this morning?
Josh Potocko: Hi Paige, Hi everybody. I'm doing great it's kind of a relaxed casual Friday which is a good way to end a busy couple of weeks around here so I'm doing good.
Paige Callaghan: Yeah, that's awesome and so where are you coming from right now? I know where -- I'm in Berkeley, but where are you speaking at right now?
Josh Potocko: You're at Berkeley. I'm on the east coast, physically in Falls Church, Virginia in a sort of nondescript gray building full of cubicles affectionately known as the “death star" and there's a bunch of senior military medical folks who do policy work here and so, it's I -- I stole someone's office near my little cubicle in the corner.
Paige Callaghan: Awesome okay well we're glad to have you here in this interview from the “death star". So, Josh a little bit about yourself, so you are originally an aerospace engineer then a flight officer, a marine helicopter flight surgeon, to an MPH graduate, and now an occupational medicine professional with a neuroscience background. Now I could say that you were one of the most interesting people I've ever had the privilege of chatting to. I feel like other our listeners and viewers will say the same so I'm curious if you could tell me a bit about how you got into occupational medicine.
Josh Potocko: The short version is I wanted to be an ER doc and I ended up my wife and I wanted to make sure we could stay together in our training so instead of me going straight through for emergency medicine I somehow landed orders to Hawaii to be a flight dock for the Marine Corps for marine pilots who fly hueys and cobras -- attack helicopters. And so I landed these great orders and she landed a great spot in psychiatry at the University of Hawaii and then while I was in that job for four years I had some revelations about what I really wanted to do and one thing led to another and I started talking to folks who are more on the occupational medicine and the aerospace medicine side of the house so basically full-time flight surgeon for military pilots or civilian pilots and I realized that oh I can do aviation, I could do aerospace medicine that would be a lot of fun I could just do that instead of ER but what if I did this OCC thing because if I do the OCC thing I can do occupational and environmental medicine training and practice and then I can also do aerospace on top of it so it kind of came to me in this weird way of wanting to do something else entirely having this experience taking care of a working population that I got to sit down in clinic and have conversations with them and help them through difficult injuries and exposures difficult experiences and building relationships with them and rarely honestly having to work a holiday weekend or an or an overnight or take call unless the whole unit was getting up and going together to deploy, which I was happy to do.
So, so it's a combination of things but it really was that four years with the Marines and having continuity and ability to see patients and take care of workers from a wide variety of workplace exposures who I could have a relationship with some of with, some of them I took care of for four years the whole time I was there they were also there the whole time we also had a lot of turnover. But yeah, it kind of it kind of just snuck up on me and that's a lot of my colleagues started out wanting to do something else most of us don't know a lot about occupational environmental medicine residency and practice during medical school it's not something a lot of exposure to during medical school so you hear this story a lot oh I went and did something else and I found my calling in OCC Med
Paige Callaghan: Right well and we are so glad that you did. Throughout that time, you've had a very successful career in that as well. So I'm curious then if you could speak to a bit about how your experience specifically in the Navy helped you get to occupational medicine like you said a lot of people find it they don't really know about it but do you find that you still would have kind of found that niche if you weren't in the Navy? Or how did that kind of inspire you?
Josh Potocko: I'm not sure honestly the military is unique we ask a lot of folks in the military especially when we deploy them you can see this play out in the news whether it's traumatic brain injuries from things that blow up and cause traumatic brain injuries, or chemical exposures due to being in risky environments, or airborne exposures like burn pits is in the news. So, we have a lot of opportunity in our military population for bad things to happen. In the aviation world I came from being in the Navy in a prior life as someone who flew airplanes so I had been an aerospace engineer because I liked flying and I flew airplanes on aircraft carriers then switched to medicine so I knew how risky that kind of work was being on an aircraft carrier the things that can go wrong, just living on a ship what that's like. So, the military is chalked full of exposures. Even things like heat, heat injury for marine recruits it's 90 something degrees in Virginia today and probably 80 humidity and we have marines down in Quantico hiking with 50 pound packs and rifles with helmets on in full gear.
Paige Callaghan: Wow
Josh Potocko: And we occasionally we have a heat injury right so we take the military takes a lot of risks so there's a lot of opportunity for prevention for treatment and trying to mitigate the risk that we know the military's going to face so that these folks can meet the mission which is of course to protect us all and keep us safe.
Paige Callaghan: Awesome thank you and you know you answered one of my one of my next questions which was the importance of occupational medicine in the military because I think that's something that a lot of people don't think about is that there's so many, as you mentioned, exposures that need to be addressed I don't think like the person would think about every day. So if you could I know you shared a few but are there any other really common occupational illnesses and injuries that you see amongst service members and how would you say that these are different I mean some that you mentioned were very different like explosives but how much is that different from the general public and do you ever work with the general public?
Josh Potocko: So I do we do see a lot of military civil -- so department of the defense department of defense employed civilians so fire a lot of firefighters a lot of cops a lot of child care workers child youth programs a lot of health care workers so we do the you know it's just like a large health system we're a huge health system so we have a ton of health care workers and our health care workers are spread out to some pretty far-flung places I mean Djibouti just near Somalia and Peru and Singapore. I mean basically you name an area of the world where there's a ton of potential unusual infectious disease risks our healthcare workers are there so that's one that's a common threat of occupational exposures any kind of infectious disease exposure and not just healthcare workers but to the operational units. And then you have things like firing ranges where yes domestically police officers and security officers do go to the firing range but our folks go to the firing ranges a lot more with a lot more powerful weapons and so the hearing protection, hearing conservation is huge in the military a huge problem still it's one of those things that requires constant vigilance he only takes one time one shot one time close enough to the head you know going down range without the proper hearing protection on that you could have a permanent injury so that constant vigilance sometimes 20-30 year career for Marines who do this routine routinely many times per year right. Not to mention the instructors on the range who are exposed to all the lead in the dust and the air so we have a very careful blood lead monitoring program for our range workers.
What else? Ships are constantly corroding so they have to come into the yard and be repaired that involves a lot of blasting so we're usually blasting with material that a very complex set of PPE is required to protect those votes every now and then they get exposed welding older ships from sometimes removing and replacing asbestos. I mean they're when you kind of pull out the manual for occupational toxicology and you just start going down the list it's kind of like yep we have that we have that we pretty much have everything in the book of occupational toxicology so you know it just depends whether the environment is more forward-deployed in an operational setting where maybe you're worried about the dust storms and burn pits and scorpion envenomation and you know infectious disease spreading through a forward operating area or you're all the way back down in Norfolk, Virginia with thousands of shipyard workers who are on all these different respiratory and chemical medical surveillance programs and you're trying to keep them from ever having an exposure to beryllium you know you're trying to prevent that from ever happening and if something does pop up on one of their exams or an exposure does occur you're there ready to treat and take the next step so yeah we the landscape is broad especially in the Navy with our ships. And then not to mention submarines every submarine in the Navy right now has nuclear power so we have a radiation health program very important same with our healthcare workers of course exposed to you know cat scans and fluoroscopy but yeah submarines are chock -- they're, it's like a space station but underwater it's completely self-contained they can go underwater for a long time and so they need to be able to handle their own toxic exposures and they do not have physicians on board they have corpsmen so we have to train non-medical people to do to be good at things like IH type activities and a little bit of medical type activity they have to kind of know what to look for in the medical side so I could go on and on and on but that's the that's the some of the big ones that come to my mind
Paige Callaghan: No that was that was so helpful. I mean I'm in environmental occupational health sciences and those half the things I didn't think about that you just listed so it definitely this is what this whole series about is bringing that new awareness and it's very interesting again to get a perspective from a service member which we don't often get so thank you again so I know now that you mentioned the death star you're in a policy position with Navy Medicine Headquarters. Could you tell me a bit about how you draw on your own experiences to influence the policy decisions now?
Josh Potocko: Sure so policy flows down you know the military is run by civilians right so in this country thankfully so policy flows down often from the commander-in-chief, the president of the United States and their assignees, their appointees secretary of defense etc. but it also really flows from Congress will write laws saying, "Hey Dr. Potocko you will in your clinic you will test every firefighter every year for PFAS in their blood." The PFAS chemical which many people are familiar with, the forever chemical, the Teflon toxin okay. So that is a direct example of advocates going to Congress saying we're worried about this chemical firefighters use a special chemical in the in aviation firefighting because there's so much gasoline and oil on airfields you have to be able to put that fire out and you can't use water so the Navy decades ago designed this foam, a foam layer that they could spray on top of an oil fire to deprive the oil from the oxygen that it needs to burn so you can temporarily put down an oil fire with this something called a triple f -- aqueous film forming foam -- mouthful right so we've been using this stuff for decades and sure enough it's got PFAS in it and we're moving away from that but in the meantime we kind of need to worry about these firefighters who have used this stuff in training used it on real fires and you know the people who stock it and remove it and clean it up and all those things and so Congress said "Hey you will do it, and oh by the way you'll do all these other things to monitor them."
And the implementation of the general broad ask the broad statement you will do this test there's a lot of nuance and detail that comes out of that that requires expertise so I think back to my training and I go wow that's crazy I spent an entire month looking at PFAS with NRDC in San Francisco that was my project let's look at PFAS and how do physicians communicate to patients about PFAS not anything to do with firefighters. This was about PFAS in water systems throughout the country that has just trickled into the water systems and now we're drinking it at our tap and it's building up in our tissues because it's a persistent organic pollutant, a POP, per the EPA, right. and it's persistent because it just you know there aren't too many enzymes or even UV light or anything that will break it down it just has a half-life of hundreds of years or decades so I was looking at it for a different reason back in training and now here I am several years later and I remember watching the hearings when they were happening and I saw the bench science and sort of the work that NRDC was doing about drinking water saw the hearings occur now I'm seeing the orders from congress flow out in law and be processed through different chains of command and hit my office as specific questions and specific asks of hey how would how do you recommend we do this type of communication this type of testing what should our survey look like and I can say you know there's a direct connection between my training and the answer that I give right and so that's a very concrete recent specific example.
There's also there's also a policy in general is complex because you have sometimes you have people who are not scientists who have to weigh in on things so public affairs and legal. So you may have an interested party, maybe it's a very high-ranking person, maybe it's a Congress person who's worried about one of their constituents or all of the military or whatever they may ask a policy question hey what's our policy on x y or z what's our policy on burn pits what's going on with burn pits and some of the work of responding to that or responding to the public. My scientific doctor brain science work also has to be vetted by public affairs and legal or vice versa. They will come up with things and I will vet them. We my team our us a bunch of us will vet what lawyers are saying to each other in official communication. So yeah policy in the military and then kind of what I'm doing is different than like at the state level where a public health officer might be the county public health officer and Covid is hitting and they're trying to figure out what do we tell our county about Covid and the public health officer kind of is the senior person making the decision but they're relying on their team policies a little different everywhere you go but where I am they're asking for my occupational medicine environmental medicine toxicology expertise to include the bench science, interpreting the recent studies, but also, hey doc you sat down with patients you know what it looks like to talk to a patient what their concerns are you know what public health risk communication tools should look like what they should feel like and that's where I'm able to, that's the voice they need me to speak up on most often.
Paige Callaghan: Awesome thank you I think with so many situations like you said policy is so complex and it gets so confusing what the nuances in each situation so thank you for shedding some light into what you do with even though yours is very specific and very different than maybe what you said a public health officer would do what would you say, I'm kind of throwing a curveball question at you, but what would you say are two skills that you would recommend to people who are interested in advising on policy in any regard or two skills you think are important to emphasize in order to be effective in your recommendations for policy?
Josh Potocko: So a lot of the policy worked since I've been here some of it's due to Covid some of it is the way it's always been is a phone call with 40 to 50 people on it the vast majority of which you've never met in person they're of all different hierarchical ranks this is my rank right down here commander O5 so I'm an officer 5 which you know sometimes I'm briefing and there are admirals on the line so 0708 so it goes up and down there are civilians many of whom yeah I just look at every civilian and say they all outrank me because they're civilians. and so there's a matter there's a matter of sort of tact and nuance of communication, whether it's a large group of 30 people sitting in a room looking at each other or even more important a phone call of 40 people on it sort of knowing where and when is your time to speak up and interject because you're probably the one who has the answer with the best reference to answer or the answer that is has the best credential behind it like the OCC med training the OCC med experience of being in clinic and so there are a wide variety of personality styles and approaches on in meetings, but essentially learning how to navigate a meeting is a skill whether it's three people or those 300 people ah thankfully I'm not on too many calls with 300 people but I am often on calls with 30 to 50 people and it's it can be tough I've also run calls that's the other thing.
Okay first you gotta learn how to attend these things and find out when and where to speak up and how to use how do you get your point across concisely and with impact what you learn what I do better now than I did when I first showed up the skill I have worked on, I hope, is to speak a little bit more, a little bit later in the conversation after many of other many other people have had their turn so I hear a little bit more of the inputs and I'm building in my head oh wait this is sounding like something I need to weigh in on and then formulating and crafting the statement that is not a six minute diatribe but is a 37 second one or two concepts and then a pause and then see if there's a follow-up and then take the follow-up that's a skill that I they do formally teach at Berkeley in in some communications classes which I never took so I'm learning it here as I go. And then also managing teams so not just leading a meeting like that which is very challenging which I have done and staying on time and on topic making people feel valued but sometimes you just have to cut people off you just have to say "hey sorry I'm really sorry but I think you just covered five different things can we go back to number one?" and they usually appreciate that the group usually appreciates that because I'm not the only one especially I'm not the only one who's like wait we just covered three, four, five that's five different things wait let's go back to one navigating the nuance of care and respect for people when you're leading me and not just cutting them off like let's just get to the next thing. I mean I've seen it go that way it doesn't usually go over as well, it's not as productive right.
So okay so there's that meetings in general but also leading teams peer leadership someone who you're on equal footing with who you feel maybe I need to just persuade this person that this is creating a formal memo with a signature by this person and routing it this way sounds really boring but this is how we make the big impact not an email tomorrow so you know there's verbals, there's emails, there's formal memos, there's signatures that go all the way up to the present United States I mean figuring out how to purely when multiple stakeholders all have good points but you're kind of saying to yourself I think I see the way forward that's going to work out best for all of us and then persuade, leadership is about persuasion right, so it's about tactfully leading others to your point of view and if that's not the way the team decides to go the leader of the team supporting their decision that's something we do in the military is kind of don't hold a grudge and don't you know be offended if your opinion is not the one taken every time 100%, kind of realizing that the multiple stakeholder approach in our world is by design and it usually works out for the best so I don't know if that's hopefully that's I mean it doesn't really sound like medicine does it? But when you're in policy that applies to anyone in policy, all the things.
Paige Callaghan: Yes yeah no that was so helpful I think I'm gonna go sign up for one of these communication courses at Berkeley and hopefully they'll bring you as a guest speaker.
Josh Potocko: Well no they're very good and I didn't it was just a matter of schedule that I wasn't able to take one that some of my colleagues did so I kind of glommed on to what they were learning asked them about some of the learning points and I'm glad there were numerous other opportunities for me during training and now to practice it and practice is the you know the best way to learn.
Paige Callaghan: That's awesome. Especially for skills like that that you are so important but so those need to be harnessed quite well so.
Josh Potocko: That's what am I doing yeah.
Paige Callaghan: So I'm curious if you could just tell me a little bit about in occupational medicine and in your policy role I know you're talking about advising policy for better health care but within that how or have you had any experience with policy recommendations to help make occupational medicine for service members in particular more inclusive more equitable or more accessible?
Josh Potocko: Yeah so many, several things come to light. So when we talk about access, the good news is in occupational medicine it's a statutory requirement so we're providing the service almost like handing resources or almost like as an employee benefit in other words the employer is saying I want to protect my workers not only do I want to I have to, OSHA tells me how, so I have to provide this as a legal right a legal good, right or else things could go very bad, employees could get sick or hurt, morale could go down, the employees might not feel great about coming into work if they don't think they're being protected, et cetera et cetera but also I'm going to follow the law and yes there are financial implications if you don't protect someone right so we're different than health care delivery primary care where unfortunately we have learned through a lot of study of healthcare systems that there is implicit bias throughout the system that people get treated differently our practice is a little bit more algorithmic in that in that when someone walks in the focus is on their job title, their job work site, and their exposures at work in the job and that drives sort of the medical decision making more than almost anything else. We've removed -- gosh I could go on all day about this.
Right, there's a ton of vulnerable populations in the healthcare delivery system when we think about vulnerable patients in our system we think about people who lack agency and lack maybe the ability to communicate with their supervisor in an honest way. In other words they're worried about getting trouble at work, they're worried about being pulled off the job, they're worried about losing their job, that's a vulnerable population for us it has almost nothing to do with demographic or anything else it has to do with what is your job. So if you're a laborer, so that is a job title labor, where you lift heavy boxes and stock shelves and drive forklifts often you have less agency than a manager or supervisor somebody's running the whole warehouse right who's running a schedule for 100 people, drivers and laborers and mechanics and plumbers. So where you kind of fall what your job tasks are and sort of what your supervisory relationship looks like that's a concern for us in terms of vulnerability for the patient, so we keep that we talk about it we keep it at the front of our mind and thankfully the sort of HR legal side of the house it's by design we're looking out for the people who are most likely to be injured or sick we're trying to prevent the high probability, high injury severity injuries and often they are the people with the least agency so it kind of it kind of works out for the most part there are other times where it doesn't work out great where…Let’s see we have hard charging marines who maybe it's cultural they, there's a culture of going to see a physician of any kind or a provider of any kind is seen as a weakness right and that's a huge problem in mental health in the military yeah OCC and environmental, environmental medicine doesn't put in the military that I've seen doesn't play a huge role in mental health but we do play a role so we always are on the lookout for folks who culturally they're vulnerable because they're kind of the implication is you shouldn't be going to the doctor that exists outside the military too it really does there are trades and businesses I mean the fishing trade, the construction industry, there's a bunch of industries where the perception is if you go to medical if you complain about an injury or a pain it's perceived weakness or perceived trying to get out of something or perceive secondary gain where we face that too for our civilians and our military so yeah it's a little different it's a great question because we probably could always use a little bit more formal education and reviving of this topic and doing a pulse check on how are we doing on this? Do we have any studies telling us how we're doing on this? Do we just think we're doing your job, or we studied it? You know that's to my top of my head I don't know that there are a lot of good recent studies about concern for equity in the class right clinic other than the ones we the things I already mentioned about you know people who are culturally taught not to go to medical and people who don't have agency that they're in their workplace beyond that I'm not sure yeah.
Paige Callaghan: Yeah that is a that's a great answer though I think in so many ways so many different industries can always do better with that, but the fact that in the way it sounds more comprehensive by looking at who has less agency and who's at the highest risk is something that in a lot of health care systems they don't even look at that. They don't look at the root of these exposures, so I think that's a great step there. So, thank you for sharing that.
Josh Potocko: Sure
Paige Callaghan: On the topic though of mental health and work-life balance though getting out of your job, how do you keep a work-life balance and what do you do outside of work?
Josh Potocko: Well when I was in Hawaii what my what I considered to be fun was going out and getting dirty in the land we had a little property there and a couple acres and it was weed covered Hawaiian clay soil that needed a lot of love so we tried to hobby farm it. So, it was spending time outside you know it's kind of like the opposite of a policy job being in a cubicle on a laptop
Paige Callaghan: Right
Josh Potocko: It's being exposed to all of the elements and all of the farm animals and all the dust kicking up it's like kind of being the worker for change and lifting heavy objects, feed bags and stuff so my wife and I did some small scale egg operations and you know chicken and duck eggs literally 40 chickens, 30 ducks, some pet pigs, a bunch of dogs. I mean we just kind of spent a lot of time outdoors playing the enjoying the Hawaiian lifestyle that is the sort of outdoorsy backwoods farm lifestyle of Hawaii and going to the beach of course. Now we're on the east coast it's different you know, it’s we live in a townhouse where we chose that by design so that to recover from busy work weeks my wife working as a psychiatrist. We can walk to things you know. We can walk to old town Alexandria which is several hundred years old and has all kinds of historical significance and lots of little tucked away little places that we can visit but it's kind of the opposite of being out in the middle of nowhere in Hawaii right. It's an old east coast city that's you know like I said muggy and hot and mosquito-y today but and then in the winter freezes over right so yep we get out we get out a lot we have bulldogs we have English bulldogs and then I play a little guitar for fun.
Paige Callaghan: I did read that you have a band so
Josh Potocko: I had a band; they're kind of scattered yeah. I I'm always trying to get the band back together that's a perpetual yeah.
Paige Callaghan: I was gonna say
Josh Potocko: After retirement, after retirement
Paige Callaghan: Yes, you have your upcoming retirement. Well congratulations on that again after a very successful career and then I look forward to the to the tour the reunion tour of your band
Josh Potocko: It might be short but
Paige Callaghan: So I have one last question for you and that is given your vast experience and your incredible experience in the Navy as a doctor and then all the other work you do in occupational medicine what would be one piece of advice you could give to someone who either wants to go into occupational environmental medicine or someone who's doing something completely different but maybe is thinking about it now?
Josh Potocko: All right so for someone who is just starting to scratch the surface to think about it and when you say OCC and environmental medicine I mean I feel like the thing that's left out of this is what's great about it is working with physicians, nurse practitioners, PAs, corpsmen so for that us that's medics - highly trained medics -, nurses who are many of whom specially trained in occupational medicine, even the front desk workers I mean we just we're very tight-knit bunch and we rely on each other very heavily. I rely very heavily on the front desk to help me navigate some of the administrative challenges of getting a record from point A to point B so that it satisfies all of the statutory requirements you know what I mean I mean I'm the one who went to med school but man they're the one who've been at the front desk for 20 years and they know how to get stuff done they know how to get supervisors on the phone right so you have a team concept within a clinic but then immediately you step out of the clinic you're talking industrial hygiene you're physically going with them to places so these are all options for people to do options are spend time in a clinic or spend time in a dirty workplace find a dirty workplace with people who are going to investigate it and check it out I mean one good thing about UCSF's and Berkeley's program is the ability to go see a bunch of places like a quarry - a cement factory, the sugar mill up in Richmond, wine, you know, wine growing operations other kind of agricultural operations where they process you know just a million different places where you can see oh my - like it's almost like a combination of like dirty jobs, that show that
Paige Callaghan: I remember that show yeah. that's going back a few years.
Josh Potocko: That's the extreme but you know what you know there's far more people doing a lot of these dirty jobs than you could ever appreciate you know yeah and so getting out and seeing workers in their natural environment. Construction I mean construction seems to be everywhere these days. Fishing, farming, forestry, I mean there's just if there's an industry that interests someone we toured Pixar and saw how the animators have all these special ergonomic setups because their animation days some of their days get really long as the movie gets closer to being finished and they have all these elaborate contraptions to keep them from getting overuse injuries to their tendons. I mean something you would never think about, I mean I would had not really thought about until we went and actually saw each office at Pixar and all the different contraptions they had standing workstations with treadmills because they didn't want to stand a whole place right so so for anyone interested in it step one is maybe learn a little bit more about either the OCC side which is what I've been talking about or the environmental side which could be air quality, so maybe it's attending an air quality board meeting, maybe it's volunteering. I mean gosh in Hawaii we have these huge beach cleanups where they do microplastic filtering. Crazy they'll go out with a hundred people everybody's got a filter and you'll sift the sand take all the micro plastics out of the sand and then put it together and take it to a processing facility just learning what's in the water what's in the air what's in the soil in a volunteer capacity or in a you know in a work capacity or as part of recreation even there's a million ways to suddenly realize oh I'm surrounded by OCC and environmental issues all the time in my daily life whether I like it or not.
Paige Callaghan: Yeah exactly
Josh Potocko: So it could be an interest in the fashion industry and how this has been in the news recently and how synthetics in the fashion industry are affecting the oceans or whatever I mean what's crazy you talk to people like me you talk to another person like me and they're going to have a totally different trajectory and background a lot of OCC and environmental medicine docs no two are alike almost is what it seems like I mean we have folks who work for Kaiser and or any other big health system and crank through clinical encounters and people who are acutely injured each day at work and we have people who do trial depositions for cancer trials where a worker might have been exposed to something that might have caused their cancer and now they're trying to get financial accountability from the company for that and the doc is testifying and reviewing hundreds and hundreds of pages of docents right those two things are as completely different as can be and they both gone to the same training program a couple years before which is crazy right and so because it's every environment and every job it's kind of everywhere and that gives people an opportunity to think about it well maybe this is a career for me of trying to protect people from these issues I mean maybe , yeah there's so many great resources mentorship resources through places like COEH and opportunities for education so I feel like people can really learn more about it in a wide variety of ways.
Paige Callaghan: Definitely I liked what you said every environment and every job I think that just speaks to the scope of the work and exactly in every job so thank you so much Josh! We're out of time for any more questions but for taking the time to speak with me and sharing your insights and perspective I'm sure our listeners and our viewers are going to really appreciate all they had to say and maybe we'll find a new career path into the world of occupational medicine and all that that has to offer
Josh Potocko: We well, I should say the last thing we definitely need people there is a shortage of just about every one of those jobs that I mentioned both in and outside the military and Covid has made that worse so Covid has highlighted the need for prevention you know of health of the protection of workers health in a very specific way and that has opened the focus the lens on our specialty so that means there's even more desire for folks who are trained in this than ever so it's an opportunity
Paige Callaghan: Exactly it's an opportunity awesome well thank you so much for joining us! Come back next week we'll have more exciting interviews with people in the occupational environmental health field where you can learn a lot more about every environment, every job, and where you can have an impact!