Internship at the Washtenaw County Health Department

Carrie Rheingans

You know you’re a public health dork when… you leave a two-hour meeting at your internship with your head buzzing about the possibilities of health promotion programs in your community. For my social work field placement this academic year, I’m placed at the local health department, Washtenaw County Public Health. On my first day of orientation to SPH, I remember hearing someone say that if you’ve seen one local health department, you’ve seen ONE local health department – meaning that each local health department is so different from the next that there aren’t many generalizations that can be made about them. WCPH is fortunate to be able to do many health promotion programs that are in addition to their mandated public health duties as required by state or federal regulations.

Our division meeting included updates on a number of health promotion programs, from smoking cessation and healthy eating to biking to work and substance use prevention. It was reassuring to hear a lot of terms I’ve been learning in my graduate studies, and to see how health programs operate in my local community – instead of just reading about it from research articles. One staff member gave a report from a presentation at  statewide conference she had recently attended in which a health communication campaign out of Jackson, Michigan was discussed. I had heard about this campaign before in my health communication course last fall – it was a final project option for some of the students in my class! It was nice to see it come to fruition and be lauded across the state. You can learn more about it on their website – Most Teens Don’t!

Most Teens Don't Logo

Another major topic of the meeting was a big grant we’ve been writing for the last couple weeks for the Michigan Department of Community Health (MDCH). It’s been a fun process being part of this grant proposal. The MDCH has funded 16 community organizations and local health departments over the last year to do planning in their communities for addressing health disparities among various ethnic populations. Washtenaw County was funded to work with African-Americans and Latinos, and we just submitted our proposal for the next phase of the grant – implementation. Even if we don’t get funded, it was a great learning experience to be able to work on developing the programs for the Latino-focused part of the proposal, as well as the evaluation plan. I got to apply what I learned in HBHE 651 (Program Development) and what I’m learning right now in HBHE 622 (Program Evaluation), in addition to many of the theories I learned in HBHE 600 (Psychosocial Factors in Health-Related Behavior) and SW 502 (Organizational, Community and Societal Structures and Processes).

Valentina’s Story About Switching from HMP to HBHE

Valentina Stackl

The second the accounting professor let us out on Wednesday afternoon I marched straight into the administration office: “I would like to switch out of my program please.” I had literally been in HMP for three days and I was 100% certain that I had picked the wrong program. I had a sneaking suspicion since applying, but I was in denial, my idealism had gotten the best of me.

I wanted to believe that I would battle through economics and accounting and that I would dominate in the best management and policy program in the country. I hoped that I would then become a famous politician and fix the healthcare crisis in the United States. Yeah right. I very quickly figured out that I didn’t want to learn about structures and systems of healthcare, I didn’t care too much about the rules and regulations that would limit my abilities, all I wanted to was help individuals and groups of disenfranchised people. I decided that I would let others make the rules, others run the hospitals, others make decisions. All I want to do is to help those subgroups of people who need help to navigate through the barriers and limitations.

Once I realized that HMP was filled with incredibly intelligent, competitive individuals who’s interests were in running hospitals and insurance companies, who wanted to be advisors to politicians and physicians, I had to bail. Let them look at the big picture, I will not. Maybe that will make me less lucrative, less successful, less wealthy in the end- but I don’t mind.

This semester I was finally able to take mostly HBHE classes. I will be learning about racial disparities and injustices and will get the tools to stage interventions and design programs at a community level. This is what graduate school was supposed to be like: doing my homework and truly enjoying it, reading articles and actually seeing myself doing the things that I am reading about.