The Epitome of Busy

Eboni

This semester has been extremely busy thus far. I do not believe anyone could have prepared me for how this semester would go. Learning how to balance things is definitely key. Of course school alone keeps one occupied enough. Along with that, I have been going thru the administrative fellowship process in which I put together packets consisting of personal statements, cover letters, resumes, letters of recommendations, and transcripts, for different healthcare organizations. I sent 18 packets off to 18 different organizations with a goal of working for one of them come July 2013.

2012 NAHSE Case Competition Team (Semifinalists)

I’ve also spent a lot of time this semester analyzing a case for the National Association of Health Services Executives (NAHSE) Case Competition, in which I and 2 colleagues competed in this October. I can truly say that was the most extensive project/presentation I have worked on during graduate school. We applied many concepts learned in class to a real life business case for Catholic Health Partners, located in Toledo, OH. We presented our case analysis, business plan, and recommendations to executives during the NAHSE Conference in Houston this past month. We made it to the Semifinals, but honestly, the most rewarding part of the process was bonding with my teammates. The NAHSE Conference is an educational conference for healthcare executives where you attend workshops, professional development events, luncheons, and most importantly, network with other healthcare administrators. The Michigan HMP network is extremely vast, which is a very good sign of the future success one can attain.

PHSAD at Food Gatherers

As President of the Public Health Students of African Descent (PHSAD), I have been busy encouraging my fellow students to attend professional development meetings and participate in service projects/activities. The most challenging part of being a student leader is engaging fellow students. Everyone is busy, and in order for students to attend events, they have to feel as if it will be worth their time. We have a few more events planned for the semester from outreach to an alumni panel. In addition to these things, we are also planning for a Minority Health Conference which will be held on February 22, 2013. We are very excited about this event and I will post more about it in the next few months.

My classes are going very well. I am taking Finance, Health Law, Operations Research, Environmental Health, and I finished my 1 credit Transformational Leadership course. I like all but one of my classes this semester, and despite this semester being one of my most challenging,  I truly feel as if I am learning skills to take with me as I jumpstart my career.

Live in the Big House!

In order to stay sane, I manage to incorporate a fun activity into every weekend. I am a HUGE football fan, and have attended every game except one this semester. The tailgates are a great time to bond with classmates and interact with one another outside of SPH. I was in the building when Michigan won their 900th game, and it was an even sweeter victory because they beat Michigan State! I have 2 more home games left as a student, which is extremely bittersweet. I will definitely miss my cohort once we all graduate.

The key to success this semester is learning how to balance everything. Once everything is balanced, things will fall into place. Hope I didn’t scare you all off from attending graduate school! Have a great week and GO BLUE!

“Moving Public Health Forward in Challenging Times”

Michelle

Hi there! I’m Michelle and I’m a second-year student in the Health Behavior Health Education (HBHE) program at the School of Public Health (SPH).  I was approached by the Office of Public Health Practice to become the newest addition to the student blogger team and I’m excited to share my experiences at SPH with you!

One of the best ways to get directly involved in the field of Public Health while you’re in your program at University of Michigan School of Public Health is to join the Public Health Action Support Team (PHAST). It’s on the Student “To Do” List for a very good reason! Because of my background in community service and in emergency preparedness through working at the American Red Cross, I was immediately drawn to this group. This last March, I went on spring break with PHAST to the Rio Grande Valley region of Texas, right along the US-Mexico border, and worked with the Cameron County Department of Health and Human Services to assess local practitioners’ perspectives about the risk of dengue fever and dengue hemorrhagic fever in the valley. The team finished 15 qualitative interviews in about one week and came to some interesting conclusions about obstacles in the health care system and the education of health practitioners and the community.

Though I’m SUPER busy this summer with two internships at the Center for Managing Chronic Disease and the Cancer Support Community, this past week, I traveled to Hartford, CT, for the National Association of County and City Health Officials (NACCHO) Annual Conference. The conference’s theme was “Moving Public Health Forward in Challenging Times.” Along with Dana Thomas from the Office of Public Health Practice, Roman Abeyta, the Epidemiologist at Cameron County Health Dept., and Brian Davis, a fellow student and Epidemiology Ph.D. candidate, I presented our results from the study of dengue fever in February at a poster session.

Brian Davis, Me!, Roman Abeyta

The conference was overall a great opportunity to learn and network with public health professionals. I met some UMSPH HBHE Alumni too!

Roman and I speaking about our project, "Assessing Healthcare Providers’ Knowledge and Concern of Dengue Fever and Binational Health in the Rio Grande Valley, TX"

It’s amazing what joining PHAST did for me this past year! I went to Texas for the first time, met so many wonderful friends and contacts, and attended and presented at my first conference! Thanks to all involved!

Feel free to email me with questions/comments in case you don’t feel comfortable sharing them below. Hope you check out my posts again soon!

Student Handbook for Global Engagement

Carrie Rheingans

Since September 2009, I’ve been working with over 30 other U-M students from schools and departments as diverse as engineering, public health, philosophy, economics, social work, medicine and nursing to create the campus-wide Student Handbook for Global Engagement as part of our work as Student Associates of the Center for Global Health. After a year of meetings and revisions, we published the first edition in August 2010, using a Creative Commons license instead of copyrighting the Handbook. We published using the Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike License, meaning that others may edit the work and use it as long as they attribute the appropriate sections to us, that they don’t make money on the resulting work (just like us), and that they share their work using the same Creative Commons license as we did.

Creative Commons - Attribution - Noncommercial - Share Alike

Since we finished the Handbook, we’ve been trying to distribute it across the nation and globe for others to use. We’ve presented at multiple conferences, and will continue to do so. Eventually, we hope that this Handbook could be part of the basic training students will have to complete before departing for global work. We’re currently working with University of Michigan offices, such as the Center for Global and Intercultural Studies and the Open.Michigan office, to get the Handbook distributed across U-M campus.

The Handbook has been recognized both at the U-M Center for Global Health’s Student Global Health Day and at the 138th Annual Meeting of the American Public Health Association, and was first presented at the Consortium of Universities for Global Health Annual Meeting in Seattle in September 2010. Please consider downloading a copy and distributing it at your university or institution!

Student Global Health Day poster with many of the contributors

Hello from Denver – the 138th Annual Meeting of the American Public Health Association

Carrie Rheingans

I’m in Denver, Colorado this week for the 138th Annual Meeting and Expo of the American Public Health Association. It’s been really exciting so far, and I’m looking forward to reporting more over the next couple days. This year’s theme is “Social Justice: A Public Health Imperative”. I really like this theme because it very nicely ties together my two degree programs. I’m here to present a poster about the Student Handbook for Global Engagement that I worked on with over 30 students from across campus for the last year through the Center for Global Health.

Student Handbook for Global Engagement

One aspect of the annual meeting I’m excited about is how much social media is being incorporated into the meeting. You can follow the conversation on Twitter by searching the hashtag #APHA10 (and I’ll be tweeting with my handle @crheinga). The two highlights so far were the opening session and the Aaron Neville concert last night. The opening session had two keynote speakers talking about increasing health parity: Dr. William (Bill) Jenkins and Dr. Cornel West. I’ll write more about these activities later, as well as give a recap about how my poster session went and the two U-M networking events I’m attending later today – one for the HBHE department and alumni, and one general U-M SPH reception. Today will be an exciting day!

Dr. Cornel West fires up the crowd at the opening general session of APHA 2010

Aaron Neville and his Quintet at APHA 2010

Bring it Back, Take it Forward

Carrie Rheingans

Last weekend (March 12-14), many units at the University of Michigan and the Ann Arbor District Library supported a conference titled “Bring it Back, Take it Forward”, about 50 years of activism in southeastern Michigan. I spoke on Friday on the Health Activism panel as an AIDS activist, along with two physicians who have been activists for healthcare reform and a man who is a former UAW union member working for healthcare reform.

Odile Hugonot Haber (moderator), Dr. James Mitchiner, me (taking notes about what everyone's saying!), Dr. Andrew Zweifler, and Al Gladyck

A video of my panel will be in the Ann Arbor District Library’s video collection if you’d like to see how it went. AnnArbor.com invited Dr. Mitchiner to write a guest column about health reform after the bill passed.

Members of the Latin@ Social Work Coalition with Arturo Rodriguez, U-M alumnus and President of United Farm Workers

Me with Dean Baker, PhD in Economics from U-M and supporter of the financial transaction tax

Me with Arturo Rodriguez and the United Farm Workers flag he signed for me!

Podcast from AADL featuring U-M SSW alumnus Jim Toy and U-M SSW student Elizabeth González.

Sex::Tech Conference Presentation!

Carrie Rheingans

It’s official – I’ve now presented at a conference! I had presented before, but they were mostly campus conferences. The Sex::Tech conference is a national conference about using mobile and internet technologies to reach youth with information about sexual health. I presented on my work in my social work internship with the HIV/AIDS Resource Center about maintaining client confidentiality when using new technologies. Two other U-M SPH students and one recent alum also presented and won a young researcher award (see below)!

As a nonprofit organization, using social media to get the word out about our work is great, since most online platforms are free. There are potential ethical issues, though, when communicating with clients – especially people already living with HIV (“clients” at HARC also includes people who come for HIV testing or with whom we interact during outreach and educational activities). Most of our accounts online say “HIV” or “AIDS” or both in the title or name. This can pose a problem for people who don’t want to come out and say they might have HIV or be at risk for contracting HIV. More obvious issues of confidentiality include a staff member posting a comment on a client’s public space – think about what could happen if I wrote to someone living with HIV on their facebook wall: “Hey, did you get that gonorrhea test  yet? You’re at higher risk since you have HIV.” We have had no such issues, but we also don’t necessarily have a social media-specific set of guidelines in place at our organization (yet!). We have confidentiality guidelines in our staff handbook, so obviously that would cover the above situation, but it could become a very gray area when a staff member is publicly friends with a client in a public space. What if someone wonders why they’re friends or how they know each other? What would be the client’s response? These are some of the topics I presented about at the conference.

Social Media and Client Confidentialilty

The presentation was more of a workshop than a presentation, resulting with the (over 65!) participants leaving with a handout that can help them get started making guidelines for their organizations. I have uploaded both the presentation and the handout on SlideShare.net.

The Sexuality and Health Lab (SexLab) in the SPH also had two students and one recent grad present their research – and they even won the conference’s first-ever Young Researchers Award! Their research was based on about 30 in-depth interviews with young men who have sex with men in our community, and they each analyzed the data with a different topic in mind. Emily Pingel was examining coming out in the techno era, Michelle Johns was looking at masculinity of young men who have sex with men who seek partners online, and Anna Eisenberg was learning about negotiation and communication in protective sexual health practices. Their presentation was well-received, with many questions from the audience afterwards.

Emily Pingel (MPH, 2009), Michelle Johns (MPH candidate 2010) and Anna Eisenberg (MPH candidate 2010) with the Young Researchers Award (a mannequin hand holding a cell phone and condom)

Student-Run Conference (Public Health Students of African Descent)

Carrie Rheingans

For the 23rd year, the Public Health Students of African Descent (PHSAD, pronounced ‘facade’) hosted their student-run conference on health disparities. This year’s topic was “Translating Research into Practice”.

Students from across campus joined community members and faculty to learn more about turning public health research into practice. Dr. Phillip Bwoman, Director of the National Center for Institutional Diversity, gave the opening keynote about the idea of cultural protection.  He described research that shows that after controlling for various risk factors, there are many areas in which African-Americans are not doing as poorly as people think. The researchers attributed this to the idea of cultural protection, the social support system that has a positive, protective effect on health outcomes.  He also cited the PBS movie series that described that third-generation Mexican-Americans have far worse health outcomes than first-generation Mexican-Americans.  The premise here is that as the second- and third-generation family members assimilate into mainstream US culture, they eat more poorly and work more hours, leaving little time for physical activity.  This contributes to many of the associated chronic conditions that disproportionately affect this community.

It is always impressive to see who presents at the PHSAD conference each year, considering the group hosting it is students and not faculty. My first session was with Zachary Rowe, of Friends of Parkside, a neighborhood group in the Eastside of Detroit. He gave us some simple advice: “make sure research is reality-based”.  Research is often done in a strict, controlled environment, where there’s enough funding, staffing, and skills to run the program effectively. Zachary was really supported of community-based participatory research (CBPR), where members of the community paarticipate in the research design, data collection, and evaluation of the research project. U-M happens to be a leader in CBPR, and Zachary has actually participated in many research projects through U-M.

Community Panel

The afternoon keynote was from Dr. Mary Lee of PolicyLInk.  Dr. Lee presented after an amazing lunch (that included many vegetarian options!) about how to use research findings to inform policy advocacy and changes. PolicyLink provided many of the materials that were used at the policy advocacy workshop I attended in February. Dr. Lee told us some stories about her work with policy advocacy in Oakland, CA around alcohol-selling stores and fresh produce-selling stores. She also found that involving the community was the way to go: “the most effective solutions come from the people living the problem” is something she mentioned more than once.

The community panel in the afternoon covered a great cross-section of topics, with many questions from students about the intersection of the work of medical and public health professionals. We had representatives from the Detroit Workers for Environmental Justice, Hope Clinic, PolicyLink, and Migrant Health Promotion. Some of the orgs do research in their everyday work, and some just used research to inform their programs. All were discussing the importance of research in their work. It’s good to hear that people use the research that people (including here at U-M) are doing, because it can get tedious reading all these new articles for classes!

Overall, the PHSAD conference was a great way to spend a Saturday. I look forward to going to next year’s conference!