ALUMNI PROFILES...WHERE THEY ARE NOW
Henry (Hal) Stockbridge, MD
OCCUPATIONAL AND ENVIRONMENTAL HEALTH POLICY
Hal Stockbridge has gone from clinician to policymaker. As associate medical director at the Washington State Department of Labor and Industries (L&I) he works with local, national, and international groups.
His job focuses on public health aspects of workers’ compensation, including chemically related illness, prevention of long-term disability, and improvements in systems of rating disability, such as the system of the American Medical Association’s Guides to the Evaluation of Permanent Impairment.
He is also involved in policy development and implementation, technology assessment, education of health-care providers, and assistance to L&I’s claims managers.
As a clinical assistant professor on our faculty, Stockbridge provides expertise in chemically related illness, multiple chemical sensitivity syndrome, brain single-photon emission computed tomography in patients with cognitive complaints, evaluation of permanent impairment, prevention of long-term disability, and other topics. He also teaches in our continuing education courses and seminars.
Stockbridge came to the UW after an internal medicine residency at the University of Texas, Houston, and The Jewish Hospital, Cincinnati. He was drawn to occupational and environmental medicine because it offers opportunities for prevention of illnesses and injuries not often seen in other branches of medicine.
Working with Linda Rosenstock, now dean of the UCLA School of Public Health, and Bill Daniell of our faculty, he undertook a case-control study of immunologic, psychiatric, and neuropsychological aspects of multiple chemical sensitivity syndrome. He also did research on lead poisoning in Washington state.
After graduation, he went to Geneva, Switzerland, as a consultant for the World Health Organization. He edited a training manual on environmental epidemiology, which was published in 1991 and distributed worldwide.
In the mid-1980s, he was a volunteer physician at a hospital in rural Taiwan. He learned to speak Chinese and was able to teach local doctors about medicine as it is practiced in the United States. This gave him an appreciation of medical problems common in developing countries.
His job at L&I involves policy development and working with legislators, workers, business and labor representatives, attorneys, and the general public.
His advice for physicians considering a specialty in occupational medicine is to make connections with doctors through university programs or through national and regional organizations such as the American College of Occupational and Environ-mental Medicine and the Northwest Association of Occupational and Environmental Medicine, the American Public Health Association, and the Washington State Public Health Association.
Stockbridge said that a specialty in occupational and environmental medicine is rewarding because of its potential to have a positive impact on the health and safety of large numbers of people locally, nationally, and across the globe.