Abstract
Developing an education effort in a completely new field is very difficult at best. The identification of a need for Nano-Safety education was realized and promoted in 2006. It took a combined effort among a number of institutes of higher-education to even raise the awareness of a need for an education effort. Developing a new area requires not only expertise in the field but plans on how to develop the material to be covered, how to present the material, and how to evaluate the results of the program developed. There are many steps required to be successful. The OSHA Susan Harwood Grant addressing Nano-Safety training for workers was critical to build a path for future training/education courses in Nano-Safety. This grant was the first of its kind to be awarded. The duration of the grant was one year 2010-2011 to facilitate training and to assess the outcomes of the participants’ knowledge. Two trainers went to four sites to conduct courses addressing Engineered Nanomaterials (ENM) occupational health and safety emphasizing human exposure. A survey was distributed to the participants at the end of the course to assess the quality of the course as well as the quality of the instructors. Overwhelming approximately 95%, the participants were satisfied with the course and training. A pretest was given to the participants to assess their knowledge of Nano-Safety and a post test was given after the training course. To test the hypothesis to determine if the training was effective, a Paired Samples t-test was used. The findings indicated a statistically significant difference between the group mean scores from the pretest to the posttest. In essence, the participants improved drastically from the pretest to the posttest scores as a result of the training. However, there are cautions were addressing these results as the sole indicator of the participants’ success.