President’s Letter 

Welcome to the Michigan Occupational and Environmental Medicine’s home on the internet.  Thank you for checking us out.  We hope to be your resource for Occupational and Environmental Medicine in Michigan.  We are one of the oldest components of the American College of Occupational and Environmental Medicine.  We are entering our 99^th year!

You Co-Presidents this year are Mike Berneking and Rob Kantor.

A little background on Mike.  He is currently practicing in Southwest Michigan as the Medical Director for ProHealth, Bronson Hospital’s Occupational Medicine department.  Prior to that, he was with Concentra in Grand Rapids for nearly 15 years as a medical director as well.  He has a special interest in Sleep and Fatigue issues, particularly as they relate to workers in the transportation industry.  As such, he has worked closely with the American Academy of Sleep Medicine over the past 10 years.

Rob Kantor is the Senior Medical Director at Ford Motor Company for Mexico, South America, Greater China and the International Manufacturing Group as well as the Global Medical Director of Industrial Hygiene and Toxicology.  He had previously worked with General Motors at Lansing Delta.  Areas of interest include International Occupational Medicine and clinical quality improvements including the increased use of evidenced based medicine throughout occupational practices.

We had our annual educational conference in Troy.  Once again we had an excellent panel of speakers.  We will be in the same location this fall, so we hope to see a lot more of you this year!

One of our greatest challenges at MOEMA is getting more member involvement.  If you would like to help, we have several opportunities.  Many of these take very little time and we would welcome any additional involvement we could get.  We especially encourage those who have not been involved before as we feel that we could benefit from fresh perspectives.  As you Co-Presidents, we want to maximize the value that MOEMA brings to you and your practice situation, but we need your involvement and your feedback in order to meet your expectations.

As an example, we need help for developing our educational program for the fall conference.  In addition to being a great opportunity to “get your feet wet” and meet some of your fellow members, you have the opportunity to improve the program so that it meets your needs and expectations.  It is also a good chance to give back to the specialty that has given us such great careers.  If you are contemplating becoming an occupational medicine fellow, this would allow you to demonstrate the type of involvement needed to achieve that designation.

Even if this sounds like too much work and don’t want to be on a committee, we still want to hear from you! If there is a topic you would be interested in hearing about at the conference, let us know.  If you would be interested in presenting at the conference, let us know.  We are in the process of overhauling our web presence. For those of you interested in content development or have experience in that area, again, let us know.  We want to make MOEMA bigger and stronger than ever as we head into our next hundred years.