National Public Health Week

This week is National Public Health Week.  While I feel that a lot of what I blog about here corresponds to public health, I realize that it's rare that I actually pass on some of what I experienced and learned from my MPH program.  The theme for National Public Health Week this year is: A Healthier America, One Community at a Time.  For my local Army post, I actually think this theme is ironic.  We have a Army Public Health Department but I have not seen a single thing issued from their department about community and health leading up to this week.  How are you supposed to build a healthier community if you rarely speak to the greater community?

You can access and view a quick little video from the American Public Health Association by going to this website: A Healthier America.

I could go on and on about how I both loved and hated the actual program that I went through, but overall I feel that I received a wonderful education and I had to do a lot of philosophical growth as a public health student as well.  While I readily agreed with the social justice principles, it seriously was difficult for me to accept the idea that regulation of behavior is at times needed. While my public health education was varied, we all took the same foundational courses for our health promotion program.  Some of those courses included: Health Systems Organization (which really helped me to understand where many of our current health system problems exist), Health Behavior Theory, Biostatistics/Epi/Research Methods, Health Program Planning, Program Evaluation, Community Organizing, and Mass Communication & Health.  The program really let me have a multitude of hands-on experiences. The internship that I did for my public health program was with an environmental organization in Oregon.  I had the opportunity to undertake a program evaluation for one of their programs that is part of a larger national environmental health organization.  And for the Community Organizing, Program Planning, and Program Evaluation courses we actually worked with local organizations to fill whatever need that organization had in relation to the point of the course.

Before starting my second year of the MPH, I also was accepted and started the Masters of Social Work at the same university.  I ended up not completing the MSW program beyond the initial summer for a variety of reasons; one of which being that I was hired on as a graduate research assistant to work with one of my phenomenal professors who was part of a NIH grant focused on the new research method of community based participatory research.  The gist of the grant was & is looking at health outcomes based on pesticide exposures among indigenous & Latino farmworkers in Oregon while also trying to gage how effective training programs are in reducing pesticide exposures. However the main thing I wanted to focus on here is the exposure that I gleaned from the summer in the MSW program when I also did a practicum placement with a County Department of Public Health in Washington state.  While I ended up not continuing that particular experience, the information I gained from that opportunity will never be forgotten and is some I would like to pass on here.

As a practicum student with the County, I worked in the HIV Prevention Unit.  The unit included MSWs who were case managers and counselors with individual clients (helping with prevention behaviors for high risk individuals, drug management, etc etc), a program specialist who primarily worked on outreach and communication strategies, and then MSWs who worked in the needle exchange program.  What I learned through that placement was that HIV/AIDS really does touch individuals across the spectrum.  I worked with women who contracted the disease from unfaithful partners, drug users, homosexual males engaged in unprotected sex, and refugees who had contracted the illness based on their experiences in their former countries.  One of the most enlightening experiences and one that opened my eyes and my mind was that of the needle exchange program however, especially since it's such a contraversial subject.  While drug use is definitely an illegal activity and a high-risk and unhealthy behavior, research & case studies report that drug rehab primarily only works when the individual is actually ready to change his or her behavior.  When you are trying to minimize risk within a population that might not be ready to change the complete behavior, then it makes sense to do whatever you can to help that population with risk reduction.  Case in point: condoms for sex workers.  Thus the same can be said about needle exchange programs---provide clean needles in exchange for dirty needles within a population that uses.  The additional perk to creating a successful needle exchange program is that testing for disease and voluntary referrals/counseling can be completed on site.  Thus when individuals are ready, resources are readily available.  On this same topic is a wonderful TED Video, this time Elizabeth Pisani: Sex, drugs, and HIV--Let's Get Rational.  I especially love "it there's two things that make people irrational, it's erections and addictions." ;)

A bit of a different post this evening, hopefully you'll tolerate my thoughts. :)