The Hazardous Duty Award was originally a ribbon-only decoration, but in the late 1980s an accompanying medal was authorized for wear. It is intended to recognize those officers in the Commissioned Corps of the United States Public Health Service who serve in a position that necessitates frequent, significant risks to their safety. For full-time assignments, an officer must be exposed to risk factors for a minimum of six months (180 days) to qualify for the decoration.
There are also specific duty assignments that make an officer eligible for the HAD. According to the Commissioned Corps’ Web site, these include frequent flights aboard light aircraft, contact with inmates or detainees, and conducting Industrial Hygiene Surveys at mining sites. Receiving hazard duty or imminent danger pay automatically qualifies an officer for the HDA.
While the precise eligibility criteria are not currently posted on the Internet, older documents give a more precise sense of what an officer would have to go through to qualify for the medal. The November 1992 edition of The Journals of the Orders and Medals Society, citing USPHS documents, notes that "frequent flights aboard light aircraft" was defined as “frequent unscheduled aircraft flights in Alaska,” with a minimum of 18 round trips or 36 one-way flights to duty destinations using charter airlines within a 12-month period. Instead of “contact with inmates and detainees,” regulations specified assignments that required contact with inmates at a Bureau of Prisons Federal Corrections facility, patients at the Forensic Hospital portion of St. Elizabeths in Washington, D.C., or detained aliens at an Immigration and Naturalization Service facility or aircraft. And officers must have logged 200 exposure hours within a six-month period while carrying out mine surveys in order to qualify for the medal.