Appx D_ Initial Contact Letter

Appendix D: Initial Contact Letter

Greetings,

Please allow me to introduce myself. My name is Julie Sorensen, and I represent the New York Center for Agricultural Health and Medicine (NYCAMH). The Center has been involved with rollover protective structures (ROPS) for farm tractors, for over 15 years. NYCAMH, with funding from the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH), currently has a project to determine key issues for tractor parts dealers in the decision to stock and recommend safety equipment for tractors.

I am contacting you because you are a representative of your company to the Northeast Equipment Dealers’ Association (NEDA). Because of your membership in NEDA, you have a great deal of opportunity to interact with the purchasers of tractor parts. Many of these parts will be used to make the tractor safer. As you may well know, the overturn of tractors is a major cause of traumatic injury in the farming industry. The retrofit of rollover-protective structures (ROPS) has been found to lower the tractor operator’s exposure to injury.

However, ROPS are frequently not found on older tractors. There are probably many reasons for this. However, if tractor parts dealers were to be asked what was most important in their decision to provide ROPS to owners of unprotected tractors, perhaps the total amount of ROPS would increase.

In the next week, you will be receiving an invitation to complete a survey. The invitation and survey will come to you as an email attachment. No personal identification information will be requested. The purpose of the survey will be to determine the most important issues to tractor-parts dealers in their decision to stock retrofit ROPS. The overall issues have been determined by previous research, and the purpose of this survey is to determine the most important, and least important, issues. This information will be shared with farm safety advocates, State legislators and other interested parties.

May we ask you to provide your opinion by completing the survey? The results will be used to make farm tractors safer . Completing the survey will take less than 10 minutes, your answers will be completely confidential, and will help improve the safety of the farming community. Your decision to provide information is completely voluntary, and no consequences will occur if you decide not to provide information.

Thank you for your anticipated cooperation.

Sincerely yours,

Julie Sorensen