Occ/prev med is outside the match. Match to a preliminary/transitional program during your 4th year to complete a PGY 1 year. During your internship, you will unfortunately have to apply for occ/prev residency. Each program is different so you will have to fill out many applications. You will also need to interview, so plan your vacation time accordingly. The upside is that while prev med is somewhat competitive based on very few spots, occ med is so non-competititve that you basically just need a medical degree and a pulse. You still get an MPH in occ med residency and you could easily go work at a public health dept, etc. as one of my coresidents did.
As other people have noted, these residencies are very, very easy. No call, weekends ever. You go to school for one year out of the 2 years. But you should really want to focus on either public health and not want to see patients (prev med) or be committed to doing basic acute care (occ med) for workers. The days of being the corporate medical director and making big bucks with banker's hours are long gone. Most occ med people are in a clinic seeing 30-40 people a day, doing lacs, treating back pain, CTS, eye injuries etc. You hardly use anything you learn in occ med residency such as toxicology. You will be very limited in what you can do if you don't like this kind of medicine. There are also multiple issues and frustrations, like any other specialty. The main one is irate people that threaten you because you feel they can go back to work and they don't want to because they are lazy, hate their boss, hate their job, their coworker smells bad, etc.
Based on what I have read from other threads about people recommending occ/prev med to people who dislike other fields or don't want to see patients or want an easy residency is that these fields certainly aren't the perfect solution. They have a narrow focus and you will be limited, so just know that before heading down this road.
