First published on June 1, 2015 in observance of the COPH’s 30^th anniversary celebration.

It was the evening of May 2.  There was a slight chill in the air as fans gathered in Traditions Hall anxiously awaiting the event of the century.

No, not the Mayweather vs. Pacquiao fight.  The other event ….

The USF College of Public Health’s Inaugural Alumni Awards Ceremony.

More than 180 supporters of the college traveled from as far as Indonesia to celebrate 28 Bulls with significant impact in public health.  From research to practice to policy to teaching, the awardees have done it all and are doing it exceedingly well.

COPH 2015 alumni awardees

The celebration began with a cocktail reception at 6 p.m., followed by dinner and the ceremony.  The dynamic Dr. Joette Giovinco served as mistress of ceremony for the evening.  She’s the first physician to complete the COPH’s occupational medicine residency program, but is probably best known as Dr. Joe, the medical reporter for Fox News in Tampa.

Dr. Joe shared stories and relics from her days as a graduate student in 1988.  She even dusted off some vintage overhead sheets and her carousel replete with slides!

“We were so fortunate 30 years ago that visionary leaders like Sam Bell and Dr. Robert Hamlin believed that Florida deserved to have a school of public health and created the foundation for the first one in the state at the University of South Florida,” said Dr. Donna J. Petersen, COPH dean and senior associate vice president of USF Health.

“It is only fitting on the occasion of our 30^th anniversary that we recognize some of those alumni who, through their commitment to their profession, improve the health of communities around the world and reflect back so positively on our College of Public Health.”

Nominations were accepted through January.  A selection committee comprised of retired and current faculty, staff, alumni, students and community partners in public health had the arduous task of reviewing dozens of nomination packets.

Each alumni awardee received a stunning silver bull engraved with his or her name.

After dinner, Peggy Defay shared her experiences as a public health graduate student.

“As a first generation immigrant from Haiti,” she said, “higher education in any capacity is a priority for me.”

“I discovered my passion for public health through my experience as a Peace Corps volunteer in Namibia.  Through this experience, I gained a better understanding of health issues at the grassroots level.  Being a volunteer in the Peace Corps helped me understand some of my weaknesses and the need to continue training in this field.”

“The past seven years have taken me to various corners of the world where I have been privileged to meet, live and be empowered by many people.  The last two years at the University of South Florida are no exception to that.  And, I can now say that I have once again lived and worked among amazing people!”

Then, it was time for the main event—presentation of the COPH Class of 2015 alumni awardees.  Each alumni award recipient was recognized during the ceremony, and all are listed here.  A few of their stories are included for those who weren’t present to hear them all on May 2.

Tabia Henry Akintobi, PhD, MPH
Director, Prevention Research Center
Director, Evaluation and Institutional Assessment
Associate Professor, Department of Community Health and Preventive Medicine
Associate Dean, Community Health
Morehouse School of Medicine
Atlanta, Ga.

“As a graduate student, I had the opportunity not just to learn how to conduct research, but how to lead it in partnership with experts who cared,” Dr. Tabia Akintobi said.  “They recognized the importance of students as significant contributors to their research as reflected in the number of co-authored papers and abstracts I had under my belt prior to graduation.”

“Among the wonderful colleagues, mentors and leaders I met during my tenure was the love of my life, professional confidante and partner in good Dr. Adebayo Akindele Akintobi [former student and husband].”

Abdel A. Alli, PhD, MPH
Assistant Professor
Department of Physiology
Emory University School of Medicine
Atlanta, Ga.

Philip T. Amuso, PhD, MS
Consultant
Clinical Laboratory Medicine and Public Health Preparedness

Retired Director
Bureau of Laboratories
Florida Department of Health
Tampa, Fla.

Roy W. Beck, MD, PhD
Executive Director
Jaeb Center for Health Research
Tampa, Fla.

Sherri Berger, MSPH
Chief Operating Officer
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
Atlanta, Ga.

“My undergraduate degree was in political science, and I didn’t know exactly what to do with it after graduation,” Sherri Berger said.

Sherri Berger and son Jacob.

“Listening to my mother’s advice to ‘get more education,’ I did what other college kids do, and I followed my boyfriend to Tampa, where he had a job offer.  I was hoping to get a master’s degree in hospital administration.  However, in my first semester at the COPH, I fell in love with epidemiology.”

Arlene Calvo, PhD, MPH
Research Assistant Professor
Depts. of Community and Family Health & Global Health
USF College of Public Health
City of Knowledge, Panama

James R. Chastain, Jr., PhD, PE, MPH
President
Chastain-Skillman, Inc.
Tampa, Fla.

“Having an undergraduate and graduate degrees in engineering, I found public health a perfect complement to that training,” Dr. James Chastain said.  “While engineering is much more design and nuts-and-bolts execution-oriented, public health was more about the personal impacts and generally a systems-oriented and advocacy approach.  There certainly was a great overlap, but even the way that I had to study was different.  Public health provided fresh perspectives to design problems, and I enjoyed expanding my horizons with my studies.  In a word, public health tended to address the “why” questions, and engineering focused on the “how” questions.  I’ve found that very helpful in my practice.”

The Chastain Family celebrated James accomplishments. James is pictured far left.

“The COPH also was quite progressive at the time in terms of scheduling courses that allowed working professionals to take the courses while working at the same time.”

Chastain managed a company and family with three children while earning his degree.

“The time pressures were intense,” he said, “and would not have been possible without a very understanding and supportive wife.”

Stephen R. Cole, PhD, MPH
Professor of Epidemiology
Gillings School of Global Public Health
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Chapel Hill, N.C.

Martha L. Daviglus, MD, PhD
Associate Vice Chancellor for Research
Professor of Medicine
Director of the Institute for Minority Health Research
University of Illinois at Chicago
Chicago, Ill.

Hanifa M. Denny, PhD, MPH, BSPH
Dean
College of Public Health
Diponegoro University
Semarang, Indonesia

“One day, we were brought to new [medical] student orientation session.  After touring a hospital ward, I was not able to eat or sleep for some days due to seeing a diabetic patient with a severe wound,” Dr. Hanifa Denny recalled.

“I asked one professor if there is a program within the college of medicine without a requirement to visit patients in a hospital ward.  I also said that I wanted to help people to live in a healthy lifestyle without necessarily suffering from sickness.  I wanted to make people healthy and able to work without a fear of being sick.  The professor explained public health and how the science would meet my expectation.  After my second year of college, I fell in love with occupational and environmental health.”

Scott Dotson, PhD, MSC, CIH
Lead Health Scientist – Senior Team Coordinator
Education and Information Division
National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
Cincinnati, Ohio

Anthony Escobio, MPH, FHFMA, CHAM
Vice President
Patient Financial Services
Tampa General Hospital
Tampa, Fla.

“I wanted to be an MD.  I took a few of the pre-med “weed out” courses as an undergraduate and did not do very well,” Anthony Escobio recalled. “I had an entry-level job at St. Joseph’s Hospital in 1990, and this is where I learned that there were many more opportunities in health care that did not involve practicing medicine.”

The Escobios couldn’t be more proud of Anthony (back row, second from right).

One of the more “interesting” events from Escobio’s COPH days involves a class with Dr. Alan Sear.

“I left a management position at University Community Hospital to be a senior analyst at Tampa General Hospital,” Escobio said.  “TGH was having a host of financial challenges at the time, and the leadership was being ridiculed in the press on a weekly basis.  One of my professors, Alan Sear, spent an entire lecture discussing the poor decisions that leadership at TGH was making.  I sat slouched in my chair knowing that I had just taken a job to be an analyst for these very leaders.  All I could think to myself was ‘what have I done?’  Little did I know that I would be at the center of one of the biggest hospital turnarounds in the country for this period of time.”

Ligia María Cruz Espinoza, MD, PhD, MPH
Associate Research Scientist
International Vaccine Institute
Leon, Nicaragua

Kathryn J. Gillette, MHA, FACHE
Market President and Chief Operating Officer
Bayfront Health-St. Petersburg
St. Petersburg, Fla.

Jan J. Gorrie, JD, MPH
Managing Partner
Ballard Partners
Tampa, Fla.

Richard T. Hartman, PhD, MS, CSP, CIH
Chief Health Strategist
PSI Inc.
Alexandria, Va.

Xiomara Zulay Hewitt, MPH
Director
Infection Prevention and Control
Adventist Health System
Altamonte Springs, Fla.

Winifred M. Holland, MPH, MA, LMHC
Administrator-Health Officer
Florida Department of Health in Clay County
Green Cove Springs, Fla.

Carol Ann Jenkins, MPH, FACHE
Director, Accreditation and Survey Readiness
All Children’s Hospital Inc.
St. Petersburg, Fla.

Claudia X. Aguado Loi, PhD, MPH, CHES
Research Assistant Professor
Department of Community and Family Health
USF College of Public Health
Tampa, Fla.

Christine McGuire-Wolfe, PhD, MPH, CPH
Firefighter/Paramedic and Infection Control Officer
Pasco County Fire Rescue

Adjunct Faculty
Department of Global Health
USF College of Public Health
Tampa, Fla.

Maj. (Dr.) James McKnight
Force Health Protection Officer
U.S. Central Command
Serving in Jordan

Maj. James McKnight’s children accepted his award since he is serving in Jordan.

Rachel Nuzum, MPH
Vice President
Federal and State Health Policy
The Commonwealth Fund
Washington, D.C.

Claudine M. Samanic, PhD, MSPH
Commander
U.S. Public Health Service Commissioned Corps

Environmental Health Scientist
Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Research Region 5
Division of Community Health Investigations
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
Chicago, Ill.

“Since 1999, when I graduated, I’ve been impressed with the expansion and creation of new institutes and centers, the college’s increasing role in global health, and announcements of various faculty accomplishments and impact,” said Dr. Claudine Samanic.  “It was humbling to be in the room with so many accomplished fellow COPH alumni.”

Angelia Sanders, MPH
Associate Director
Trachoma Control Program
The Carter Center
Atlanta, Ga.

Natalia Vargas, MPH
Public Health Analyst
Health Resources and Services Administration
U.S. Department of Health and Human Services
Rockville, Md.

Angelica C. Williams, MPH
Disease Intervention Specialist
Florida Department of Health in Broward County
Pembroke Pines, Fla.

Lauren B. Zapata, PhD, MSPH
Commander
U.S. Public Health Service Commissioned Corps

Senior Research Scientist
Division of Reproductive Health
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
Atlanta, Ga.

COPH Deans, from left: Drs. Peter Levin, Donna Petersen (current) and Charles Mahan.

Without question, the night was all about the alumni awardees, but there were a few other show-stoppers in the room. Namely, COPH Deans Drs. Peter Levin, Donna Petersen, and Charles Mahan (above) and COPH alumnus and USF Board Trustee Scott Hopes (below left).

USF Trustee Scott Hopes (on left) with Lesley and Rick Bateman.  Lesley was the college’s first public affairs and development officer.

Founded in July 1984, the USF College of Public Health is wrapping up a yearlong celebration of educating and training public health professionals.  Some of the 30^th anniversary year highlights include

• regional events in Orlando, New Orleans, Chicago, and Washington, D.C.
• the Dean’s Lecture Series featuring alumni like Drs. Richard Hartman, Charlan Kroelinger and Hana Osman.
• community building activities like a tailgate and USF football game, fall networking social during homecoming, Super Bowl party and spring BBQ.
• Team #USFCOPHRocks with more than 50 public health Bulls participating in the Gasparilla Distance Classic.
• raising almost $70,000 in new commitments to student scholarships in the college.

“We are proud of the work we have done building on a solid foundation and creating an outstanding school of public health—one that just recently jumped in national rankings from 21 to 16,” Petersen said.  “In addition to our great champions and the consistent high performance of our faculty and staff, the reputation we have earned is due in no small measure to the incredible contributions of our alumni.”

The alumni awards ceremony was made possible with support from the COPH, as well as corporate sponsors USF Health and Bayfront Health-St. Petersburg, and individual sponsors Drs. Jay Wolfson and Phillip and Jean Amuso.

It takes a village to raise a family AND host an amazing alumni awards ceremony.  Salute!

Alumni awardee Dr. Abdel A. Alli (second from right) enjoyed the festivities with his family, as well as nominator and faculty mentor Dr. Donna Haiduven (center) and her husband, Michael Gronquist (far right).

Alumni awardee Dr. Arlene Calvo shares a special moment with fellow alumnus Dr. Clement Gwede.

Go, Bulls!

“I applaud the College of Public Health for recognizing alumni who not only have tremendous accomplishments, but who have made a difference in the lives of so many,” said Bill McCausland, executive director of the USF Alumni Association.

Story by Natalie D. Preston, College of Public Health.  Photos by Ashley Grant and Humberto Lopez Castillo.

Related media:
Alumni Awards photo gallery on Facebook

The post Our past is our future: College recognizes distinguished alumni appeared first on College of Public Health News.

First published on May 14, 2015 in observance of the COPH’s 30^th anniversary celebration.

Long before the deluge of online learning became a given of modern education replete with a glut of overnight “universities,” USF’s College of Public Health launched a distance-learning presence that was formidable before online classes even existed.

From 1990-93, 45 state health department employees in Tallahassee earned master of public health degrees from USF via the old-fashioned method of distance learning.  Every Tuesday, a COPH professor would journey to Tallahassee to teach a three-hour course that evening, said Dr. Charles Mahan, at that time state health officer, and later COPH dean.

Dr. Charles Mahan

“We gave them Tuesday afternoon off, and they gave up their evening,” Mahan explained.  “One professor would come up for a month and do the whole core segment of epidemiology and biostatistics, and then somebody else would come up and do the whole core of community and family health.

“When people in practice throughout the state at the health departments saw what we were doing up there, they came to the college and said, ‘Please, do that for our staff.’  That’s when we began the distance-learning program.”

Technology offered a more efficient means by 1994, when COPH began beaming public health courses via satellite to 33 host sites at state and local health departments across Florida.

Answering a mandate

“USF College of Public Health had a very good partnership with the Florida Department of Health,” recalled Sandhya Srinivasan, COPH director of educational technology and assessment, “and through this partnership, we were able to deliver public health education while utilizing health department meeting space and satellite equipment that was already part of the Florida Department of Health satellite network.  We were able to piggyback on that and beam our classes to busy health professionals.”

Sandhya Srinivasan, MPH, MEd

WUSF-TV had an uplink facility, Srinivasan explained, which enabled COPH to buy satellite time at the discounted educational rate.  The telecasts were cabled to the uplink facility in Clearwater, then beamed to the satellite from there.

As part of the founding of the college a decade earlier, USF and COPH had a legislative mandate to train public health employees statewide, Srinivasan said.  A needs assessment at the time signaled the need when it found that very few public health workers had had any formal public health training.

“They had come to public health through medicine or nursing or sociology, but they were not trained in public health,” she said, “and so the college had a huge challenge in front of it.”

Two evening courses were initiated to meet that challenge, she said.  Each met once a week for three hours, and each had an on-site technical point person should the satellite or any link in the technology fail.  Technical and material needs were communicated via phone or fax in those days before the advent of personal computers and e-mail.

Given those limitations, early growth was slow, but within a few years, the need for more courses and faster, easier means of delivery coincided well with the PC age.  In 2001, Srinivasan said, technical advances and growing interest in the program sparked its rapid expansion.

“We started incrementally,” she said, “moving our classes from satellite to a blended online-and-satellite format.”

The Department of Education weighed in with a $3-million grant for instruction in technology.  That IIT grant, as it was known (standing for Innovations in Technology and Training), enabled the college to hire instructional designers who brought in multi-media components that completed the transition from satellite-online hybrid to a fully online operation.

From online courses to online degrees

With all classes delivered entirely via Internet, geographic limitations were gone.  Anyone, anywhere could take courses on the World Wide Web, and host sites were things of the past.  It wouldn’t be long before the state’s first public health college conferred the state’s first fully online public health degrees.

According to figures supplied by David Hogeboom, statistical data analyst for COPH, the online degree program has conferred 383 MPH degrees in various concentrations since spring 2001.  The total represents more than one-fifth of all MPH degrees and more than one-eighth of all degrees awarded by COPH in that timeframe.  Srinivasan said nine students graduating on Dec. 13, 1998, from the Public Health Practice program were the first to earn their degrees via satellite.

COPH distance learning’s first nine MPH graduates made headlines in 1998.

“Today, in addition to public health practice, we have five other master’s concentrations online and 11 online graduate certificates,” Srinivasan said.

Unlike other classrooms, the virtual variety requires technical design specifically geared to disseminating educational materials.  Accordingly, full-time instructional designers are a big part of the picture at COPH online.

“Our office consists of six full-time instructional designers and a graphics designer,” Srinivasan said.  “The designers are assigned to particular courses and work hand-in-hand with faculty in preparing course materials and assessments.  They are able to parse down a lesson to bare essentials and match the right technology that can deliver that content efficiently to the students.”

Today’s COPH online learning team.  Back row, from left: Thomas Reilly, James Taylor, Andres Abril, Carlos Montoya, Samantha Lopez.  Front row, from left: Ana Vizcaino, Jung Lim, Sandhya Srinivasan, Trudian Trail-Constant.

Srinivasan said one of the concerns the designers address is interaction.

“It is less than ideal to listen to a talking head for three hours, so we use different types of interactive technologies that enable and even encourage student interaction,” she said.

Much of that interaction involves typed responses, she said, but even that is rapidly changing.

“As part of Canvas, the learning management system at USF, we now have access to an interactive virtual tool called Blackboard Collaborate.  Students and instructor log in at a given time and date, and the tools within that virtual classroom allow for interaction.  Students and faculty are able to interact via audio, video and whiteboard tools to do everything they could do in a traditional classroom.”

Alison Oberne, MA, MPH, CPH, an instructor in the USF College of Public Health, narrates a lecture for an undergraduate public health course using the recording space in COPH used for recording content for the lectures and modules of most of the college’s online degree programs.

It doesn’t take an instructional designer to appreciate the brightness of COPH’s online future.

When the college launched its online master’s program, Mahan said, deans at other colleges of public health told him it would never work.  In fact, he said, deans from the older schools of public health at revered institutions like Harvard and Johns Hopkins flat-out swore they would never do it.

“Now, of course, they all do it,” he said.  “Absolutely, we were the first to do it.  We were a couple of years ahead of everybody else in offering the full MPH by distance.”

“The tools from the beginning to now have undergone tremendous change,” Srinivasan said.  “We are committed to remaining on the cutting edge, so the future of our program will be wherever virtual classroom technology will allow us to go.”

Story by David Brothers, College of Public Health.

The post College of Public Health a pioneer of online learning appeared first on College of Public Health News.

First published on April 6, 2015 in observance of the COPH’s 30^th anniversary celebration.

Dr. Karen Liller has been a child and adolescent injury prevention researcher for a quarter of a century.  A professor in the USF College of Public Health’s Department of Community and Family Health and a member of the Florida Injury Prevention Advisory Group, she worked with a Tampa General program called More Health in the mid-1990s to help evaluate its health education programs.  One of those programs promoted bicycle helmets for children.

Dr. Karen Liller

“I evaluated their program, and I started observational studies of children’s bicycle helmet use in Hillsborough County,” Liller said.  “I was monitoring this because, as part of the Injury Group, I knew this bill had been denied two times before.  We were all part of the advocacy efforts with Tallahassee between the state of Florida program, More Health and the college to get this passed.”

A natural proponent of requiring kids to wear helmets when they rode their bikes, Liller had her interest piqued.  From casual observation alone, she surmised that few were.  Determined to put scientifically collected numbers to the problem, she and a cadre of her graduate students set about the task of collecting data.

From low expectations to high hopes, then action

“I was focused on unintentional injuries in children,” she said.  “Nationally, this was a huge issue.  I had some colleagues at Harborview Injury Prevention Program in the state of  Washington, and they were some of the early leaders nationally in helmet use.  So I naturally got very, very interested and started looking, started conducting observational studies, because I didn’t know:  What is the helmet use rate? “I developed and performed community observations,” she said.  “I would hire my grad assistants, and they would stand on corners doing observational surveys of kids in helmets.  We mapped out the whole county, and I had them on streets everywhere.  We had a whole protocol of where we wanted to be, because we wanted to capture observational surveys in many different places – in community sites, in schools, not near schools, etc., so we had a good idea of what was going on in Hillsborough County.”

As low as Liller’s expectations were, reality turned out to be even worse.

“I can tell you, it was pitifully low,” she said.  “For children under 16, it was about three percent.”

Liller set out on a concentrated campaign to get a helmet law passed.  It already had languished and died in two previous legislative sessions, and she was determined to make the third try count.

“I did many radio spots and TV spots and Good Morning Whomever promoting bicycle helmets as the law was working its way through the legislature,” she recalled.

“I wanted to get ahold of it,” she said, “because I knew this was a national issue, and I knew states were starting to pass laws.  Florida is a tough state to get a law passed for children’s injury prevention.  In fact, we just got the booster seat law done.  We were one of the last states to do that.  I knew it was going to be a battle.  So, I knew I’d better get started early.” Liller learned through focus groups that legislators weren’t the only people she needed to convince.  Some parents didn’t want a law telling them to put helmets on their kids’ heads.  After all, bicycle shops already were selling more helmets.  McDonald’s was giving out helmet discount coupons and safe rider certificates.  Why should there be a legal mandate?

“My answer to them was, ‘Do you have a driver’s license?  Yes?  Well, the government told you to do that.’

“It always surprised me when parents would argue with me on this issue.  The famous one for me was, ‘I rode a bike all the time when I was a kid, and I never got a head injury.’  I’d say, ‘When was that?  Where was that?’  And it would be some idyllic little community in some other state, and I’d say, ‘Try riding a bike in Tampa now, and get back to me on that.  The world has changed.  The roads have changed.  The danger level has changed.”

Clearly, the law’s chief proponent had taken on a daunting task, but being part of the state’s first college of public health had its rewards.  Dr. Charles Mahan, state health director under Gov. Lawton Chiles, was a valuable ally.  COPH was still the only school of public health in Florida, and COPH professors were trekking all the way to Tallahassee to teach weekly classes at the state health department office.  Through the department’s close working relationship with COPH, Mahan already had known Liller and had been supportive of her efforts.

Dr. Charles Mahan

“We knew that Karen was really focused on getting a child helmet law through, and certainly, we were very much in favor of that,” said Mahan, who was COPH dean by the time the measure was in its third incarnation.  Mahan had known Chiles since well before the latter began his two terms as governor.

When Mahan was a medical student at the University of Florida, Chiles became interested in his work on infant mortality.  Personal and professional bonds soon followed.

“When he was a senator, I would go around the country and hold hearings with him,” Mahan recalled.  “He would do all the talking, but I would help him figure out what to say, depending on what the issue was.”

Mahan knew the governor well enough to know he was predisposed to children’s health issues.

“Any issue related to children was something that Gov. and Mrs. Chiles were supportive of,” Mahan said.  “Anything that needed his support on children’s issues for safety or survival or whatever, he would tell the staff – me and everyone else – to make sure that it got supported.” With the encouragement of a popular governor, the proposal was gaining momentum.  The awareness raised by the news of the pending legislation helped engender educational outreaches that helped the ball roll faster.

“Betty Castor, who became president of USF, was head of education at the time,” Mahan said, “and the school systems jumped right in with educational efforts.”

Those collective efforts eventually generated the irresistible momentum that carried the measure over the finish line.

“With Charlie’s support and the governor’s, on the third attempt, it was successful,” Liller said.  “And I testified and did a variety of things locally, as well, for the bill.  A colleague of mine also did a cost-effectiveness study, and he also testified with that in Tallahassee.  I think it was a combination of all of these things.  We kept sending the legislators our research findings, and with all the backing, eventually, in 1996, the bill passed.”

A victory not etched in stone

“Bike helmets are an investment we should make to ensure our children’s health and safety,” Chiles declared as he signed the bill onto law.

The measure became effective on Jan. 1, 1997, and for the next 12 months, it was easy for anyone to live with.  A violator would receive a warning and a bicycle safety brochure.  As of Jan. 1, 1998, however, that brochure was delivered with a $17 citation.  It was a light fine as fines go, and even it could be circumvented.

“After the first year, you could get a fine if the child was riding, was under the age of 16 and didn’t have a helmet on,” Liller said, “but you could get around that if you could show evidence of a bicycle helmet.”

That, of course, was only when the law was enforced, which, according to Liller, wasn’t – and still isn’t – very often.

“Police are very reluctant,” she said.  “I talk to them about how many tickets they’ve given, and usually the answer is ‘none,’ at least in Hillsborough County.  They’re very reluctant to stop a child on a bike.”

Nonetheless, she said, by 1998, helmet use had risen exponentially, to 67 percent in Hillsborough County.  So even without much enforcement, the law was accomplishing its purpose.

“I think the law has been great,” Liller said.  “We did an analysis of its efficacy.  We did show that helmet use has gone up, and we showed that injuries have gone down.  And that was great.  That was the intent of the law.  Injury prevention does its best, many times, when there’s a policy change or a legislative change, because it just reaches more people.”

Mahan agreed. “Having it as law is a big awareness raiser,” he said.  “It gets all over the papers and the news again and again.  The legislature is considering this measure.  That’s news.  The legislature passed it today.  That’s news.  The governor signed it into law.  That’s news again.  It went into effect today, so that’s news, too.

“For the majority of parents, who care so much about their kids, just the awareness-raising and then seeing other kids out there with their helmets on helped, but it took time.  As with any legislation, it takes about three years to get a good idea through.  It’s very hard to take a new idea on regulation to the legislature.”

“It was a very exciting time,” Liller said, “because, the first couple of times, I would go to the injury meetings, we’d work on the language of the law, and it just kept getting defeated.  The first year we did it, I think we just put it out there and said, ‘Let’s just see how it goes.’  The second year, we didn’t have the information about the penalty.  I still don’t like the penalty.  I don’t to this day.  But it was a really exciting process, and I’m so glad I was part of it.”

Still, Liller knows that no law is etched in stone.  The state threw a scare into helmet proponents and safety advocates in general when it partially repealed its motorcycle helmet law by limiting the requirement to riders under 21. “We were very afraid that they were going to repeal the bicycle helmet law, too, but so far, so good,” Liller said.  “They haven’t touched that law.  I think that’s because it’s for children.  I think if we would have had that helmet law for all ages, we would have been in trouble.”

“When I was at the state health office,” Mahan said, “the helmet law was a big plus, but at the same time, we lost the motorcycle helmet law, and that’s had tremendous consequences.”

The work continues

“We want it to become a norm,” Liller said of bicycle helmet use.  “We want it to be that, when these children have children, there won’t be any question when you get on a bike.  And we’re starting to see that.”

Mahan concurred.  He said he and his wife live two blocks from an elementary school, and the progress is easily visible.

“A lot of the kids are riding their bikes to school,” he said, “and every one of them has a helmet on.”

Work since the law’s passage has been geared toward bicycle helmet give-away programs.

“If you don’t have a helmet, we can find you one,” Liller said.  “We can find a program – Safe Kids, Tampa General, we can find somewhere to get you a helmet.”

Liller’s work on the law continues to influence safety initiatives.

“Our work has been in world publications about helmet use, about laws, about how it’s done,” she said.  “The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation wants to know about strategies, and it seems that the strategies that were developed in the ’90s – people are still really interested in those.  We were always pleased that our work is often cited as an example, even though many years have passed.”

Liller said she also is gratified to see the lasting validation of her and her colleagues’ methodology.

“It’s interesting that the work that we did is still being used.  If you run a program, you do some observational surveys.  You look at that helmet use on those kids.  You don’t just ask them.  You actually watch them.”

In the intervening years, Liller’s focus has shifted to high school sports injuries, but she remains committed to the legislation she helped to bring about, and she remains engaged with it, most recently as a content reviewer for the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Wisconsin Population Health Institute for strategies they want to propose for child safety seats – and yes, bicycle helmets. Her message for the naysayers remains the same.

“We’re not telling children they can’t ride bikes,” she said.  “We’re not telling children they can’t have fun or anything else we were accused of so often.  Basically, it’s just taking necessary precautions.  There’s been some literature that says we should let kids take more risks.  We don’t want to stop anyone from taking risks or having fun or getting exercise.  We just don’t want a child to die from a perfectly preventable head injury.  We’re smarter now.”

Story by David Brothers, College of Public Health.  Photos courtesy of the National Highway Traffic Safety Association, Helmets On Heads, County Mayo and other sources.

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To date, the USF College of Public Health has recognized dozens of alumni with significant impact in public health. Nominations are accepted on a rolling basis.

“During the process of soliciting and reviewing nominations for 2015 it became clear that the Outstanding Alumni Awards should be an annual event recognizing our more than 11,000 alumni doing great things in various places,” said Dr. Heather Stockwell, emeritus professor from the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics.

To be considered for an Outstanding Alumni Award, nominees must have earned an academic degree (BS, MHA, MPH, MSPH, PhD or DrPH) from the COPH.

“Our alumni are doing wonderful things locally, statewide and internationally and this award is one way that the college can acknowledge their success,” said Dr. Karen Liller, COPH professor.

The Outstanding Alumni Awards are presented in Tampa during National Public Health Week, which is typically during the first week in April.

Complete details on eligibility and the nomination process are on the  alumni awards website. The deadline for all materials to be received is 11:59 p.m. on Dec. 1.

“I applaud the College of Public Health for recognizing alumni who not only have tremendous accomplishments, but who have made a difference in the lives of so many,” said Bill McCausland, executive director of the USF Alumni Association.

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First published on February 10, 2020 in observance of the COPH’s 35^th anniversary celebration.

The USF College of Public Health become one of the first public health programs in the nation to transform the core curriculum to meet 21^st century public health needs and to meet changing Council for Education in Public Health (CEPH) competency requirements in 2014.

“This curriculum was designed to reflect the true, interdisciplinary nature of public health. While, historically, schools and colleges of public health have introduced students to the core curriculum of public health in the first year of the master of public health (MPH) program from independent perspectives, this approach lacked an interdisciplinary and integrated approach required to address public health problems,” said Dr. Jaime Corvin, associate professor and director of the MPH program.

Faculty at the COPH were charged with addressing this problem, rethinking our curriculum and developing a program to prepare the next generation of public health professionals. 

Today, more than 700 students have successfully completed the new core at USF and have earned the Certified in Public Health (CPH) designation, a requirement of the new program. 

“People often ask, why change the core?” Corvin said. “Simply put, our MPH program was a strong program. But it was no longer addressing the realities of 21^st century public health problems. We deal with complex problems, we come together as multidisciplinary teams to address these issues, and we don’t act in silos. There was a need to teach traditional content but in an integrated fashion and to ensure that our students were receiving practical, hands-on-training.” 

The COPH’s MPH program now integrates rigorous public health training with broad exposure to the breadth and depth of the field, according to Corvin.

Students learn the traditional public health content but are required to apply those skills through case studies, communications assignments, and the analysis of public health data in History and Systems, Population Assessment I and Population Assessment II, as well as the development of public health promotion campaigns in Translation to Practice. 

“Students work in groups, they debate, they write – a lot – and they synthesize public health problems, coming together to develop innovative strategies to address the problems poised,” Corvin said.  

The MPH core courses are taught by a team of faculty and leaders within the college, including Dean Donna Petersen and Drs. Anna Armstrong, Jason Beckstead, Tom Bernard, Joe Bohn, Jaime Corvin, Rita Debate, Zac Pruitt, Troy Quast, Tom Unnasch, Kate Wolfe-Quintero, Ronee Wilson and Janice Zgibor.

In addition, each cohort is supported by a team of doctoral and masters level teaching assistants. Together, this team strives to provide the best experience for students as they learn and practice the foundational public health concepts. 

Corvin also shared how, as the student body changed and as CEPH competencies were revised, revisions were required to ensure students were graduating with the tools and skills needed to be successful in the workforce. 

Such revisions included a renewed focus on communication and leadership, the importance of writing and the need for enhanced professional development skills.

“In fact, Dr. Anna Armstrong, who leads the USF BullPEN initiative, recently conducted a study to assess professional development needs of our students as perceived by our students and the local workforce,” Corvin said.

Armstrong found that students felt they needed job readiness skills and employers believed students needed help with communication and professional development.

As a result, the USF BullPEN was launched and elements of professional development were incorporated in the Core curriculum. 

Corvin and Armstrong believe that the focus on professional development will help our students to be better prepared as they enter the workforce. They also hope that this will instill a culture of continuing education, lifelong learning, and professional development, all important tenants of the field.

“It’s a lot of work and it takes a commitment. A commitment to your studies and to the field. But we hear back from our graduates about how prepared they feel in their new careers. To me, there is nothing more rewarding,” Corvin said when asked how students receive the program.

The faculty often receive feedback that the strength of USF’s MPH program is its focus on integration of core subject areas and real-world application.

Hari Venkatachalam, a recent graduate of the program, shared “when I joined the Department of Veterans Affairs as a Health Science Research Specialist, I found myself initially overwhelmed with the diversity among the research staff: There were nurses, anthropologists, physical therapists, and biostatisticians. They each brought such unique skills. But that’s what the USF’s MPH program prepares its students for. It prepares us for real world public health work, whether it’s by giving us the analytical skills to perform data management, honing the investigative skills to perform reviews of literature, or the fine-tuning of our writing and oratory skills to defend a program’s implementation. The program is built in a manner that when a student joins the workforce, they find themselves jumping into the position like riding a bike; The skills have become second-nature.” 

Other students have gone on to continue their education, USF’s MPH serving as a strong foundation for the next step in their career path.

“I found that I entered the program vastly more prepared and comfortable than my peers, and have bragged about my integrated MPH on more than one occasion,” said Amina Zeidan who is now a doctoral student in a translational science program at the University of Texas. “These courses were more realistic and relate-able to real life work experiences.”

Corvin said the MPH committee will continue to evaluate and revise the core, striving for a more rigorous foundation for the next generation of public health professionals. 

“Our graduates are the future – public health professionals poised to bring people together and to be the change!” Corvin said.

Story by USF COPH Staff Writer

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First published on October 7, 2019 in observance of the COPH’s 35^th anniversary celebration.

Advocacy is as important in public health as data analyses and needs’ assessments.

But students have traditionally lacked advocacy experience.

In 2018, Dr. Karen Liller, a USF College of Public Health (COPH) professor specializing in injury prevention and health education, decided to remedy that situation by starting the Activist Lab at the COPH.

The group, which is run with the help of two research assistants and a six-student advisory board made up of graduate and undergraduate students, provides interdisciplinary advocacy, education, research and service opportunities for students to develop the skills that will promote their success as effective public health advocates and leaders.

The Activist Lab, directed by Liller, is the second such lab in the country, with the first being at Boston University’s School of Public Health.

Liller says she had been wanting to start a program like the Activist Lab at the COPH for a while, to compliment the Doctoral Student Leadership Institute she began as dean of the USF Graduate School, now known as the Office of Graduate Studies.

“I strongly believed students needed much more preparation in leadership and advocacy skills before they graduated,” Liller commented.

In just one year of its existence, hundreds of students have taken part in the Activist Lab’s educational and service opportunities, which include activism boot camps, seminars, guest speakers, journal clubs, writing groups, research efforts and public health in a minute videos. These videos—only 60 seconds long—have featured faculty and community leaders discussing pertinent public health issues, everything from the importance of voting to refugee health.

According to Liller, some of the Activist Lab’s first-year highlights include:

• work with Dr. Mark Roberts and other University of Pittsburgh researchers on a measles simulator for Florida (called FRED Florida Measles Simulator), which shows how cases of the viral infection can grow in an area with just a 10 percent drop in immunizations
• a gun violence prevention and advocacy seminar, held in partnership with USF Health and led by Parkland shooting survivors David Hogg and Emma González

Things won’t slow down for the Activist Lab anytime soon. In addition to the continuation of seminars, speakers and learning opportunities, the organization has the following things planned for the future:

• a boot camp on the prevention of firearm violence, scheduled for January
• a new program called “More Opportunities to Use Learned Advocacy” (MOULA), where students work with particular agencies, such as Moms Demand Action and the Guardian ad Litem program, on advocacy issues
• the launch of a new podcast series called “Advocation—Change It Up!” The first podcast features Dr. Jill Roberts, a COPH alumna and assistant professor of global health, discussing the importance of immunizations.
• an oral presentation on activism, to be delivered at the 2019 American Public Health Association (APHA) meeting in November

The Activist Lab serves as an exciting hub of learning and action for students to become directly involved in practicing leadership and advocacy skills, says Liller, who sees the lab’s numbers growing and its reach expanding beyond the college and university to the state, nation and world. 

“For example, with our podcast new persons will be reached and advocacy skills can be expanded and practiced,” remarked Liller. “Students can become part of our advisory board and really help shape the direction of the lab. They can participate in all of our events, and as we grow more and more opportunities will become available.”

Story by Donna Campisano, USF College of Public Health

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First published on October 20, 2014 in observance of the COPH’s 30^th anniversary celebration.

October is Domestic Violence Awareness Month.

Like many entities directed at the greater public good, the USF College of Public Health’s Harrell Center was the product of a private philanthropist’s gift. James Harrell and his family wanted to do something to help eliminate family violence, and they acted on that desire. The result was a 1997 endowment that set the stage for what has become an international force.

“The intent of the Harrell family was to provide a center that would focus on family violence,” affirmed Dr. Martha Coulter, the center’s founding director, “but they were particularly interested in looking at the prevention of family violence, as well as research that would be directly applicable to prevention and intervention.

“So the mission of the Harrell Center, really, is to be an intermediary between research and practice, to do research that is focused on family violence intervention and prevention across the lifespan.

“The grant was an endowment, so the funding is very limited, because it’s just the interest on the endowment. Now, most of the income is from other grants and contracts,” Coulter said, “but what the Harrell endowment did was provide the base for doing that kind of research.”

Brick sponsored by the Harrell Center in remembrance of James Harrell after his death in 2007.

One of three faculty members at the center full-time, Coulter, whose doctorate is in maternal and child health, teaches three courses: Family and Community Violence, Child Maltreatment, and Child Health, in addition to coordinating the maternal and child health academic concentration at COPH.

“In the very beginning, there was only the grant and the establishment of the center conceptually,” she said. “Over the years, we’ve developed.”

That development recently necessitated alignment into three divisions.

“The specific divisions – the redesigning of the organizational chart – has really been something that I’ve done this year,” Coulter said. “Before that, over the years, we’ve just developed these different projects and all worked together, but it looked like now we were at a place where we really needed to have a little bit more separate organization and to develop some strategic goals and objectives in each of those content areas.”

The result is a children’s services division directed by Dr. Lianne Estefan, an intimate partner violence division directed by Coulter, and an elder mistreatment division directed by Dr. Carla Vandeweerd. Dr. Karen Liller recently joined the center as a regular collaborator focusing her attention on the overlap between child maltreatment and unintentional injury, Coulter said, and “usually about 10” graduate students round out her staff. A community advisory board is among the center’s numerous external extensions.

“The children’s section has been very involved in looking at issues regarding the prevention of violence in the community,” Coulter explained, “and the center has developed a virtual research institute with one of the community agencies, Champions for Children, which is a multi-program unit, so that we can do research that is truly collaborative. We’ve worked very consistently with them over the years.”

Graphic that Harrell Center graduate assistant Natasha Hojati created for the Center’s Facebook page.

Coulter said that much of what her intimate partner violence section does involves the courts, so much so that she has become a regular consultant for the courts and has undertaken the task of evaluating the effectiveness of their intervention programs for batterers. Developing and continually improving guidelines for batterer intervention and responses to the needs of victims have been major off-shoot projects.

Among the section’s more significant research findings is that female batterers are falling through the cracks. While the county’s intervention for male batterers has been “very effective,” Coulter said, it has largely failed to successfully intervene with female batterers, who comprise about 15 percent of all convicted batterers in Hillsborough County.

“The clinical providers of these programs,” she said, “have been saying for a long time that they didn’t think the state-mandated curriculum for men was really the right curriculum to use for women.”

Among many leaders and dignitaries who have visited the Harrell Center over the years was then-Attorney General Janet Reno, who attended an elder abuse conference sponsored by the Center in 2001. The attorney general is pictured above with students Seraphine Pitt (left) and Carol Williams, and below with Dr. Coulter.

The elder mistreatment division concentrates on elders with dementia and the kinds of violence against them, which is, Coulter said, “fairly common, unfortunately, from both spousal caretakers and children taking care of elderly parents. The dynamics of this are very different from other sorts of domestic violence and really have a lot to do with people not understanding how to help people who have dementia.”

Coulter said she considers a new project in the division to be particularly tantalizing and potentially groundbreaking.

Called the Senior Surfers Project, Coulter said it looks at the rapidly expanding but little-known phenomenon of women over 50 seeking relationships online and getting responses from people who wind up physically, emotionally or financially harming them.

All previous research on Internet connections leading to violent encounters has been on adolescents, she said, so Senior Surfers is another project aiming to keep potentially overlooked victims out of the cracks – in this case, the cracks that open at the nexus of society and technology.

Dr. Coulter chats with Judge Dennis Alvarez (left) and James Harrell at a 1997 function.

With so much involvement in the local community, including working closely with the Spring and, until its recent demise thanks to funding shortfalls, the Family Justice Center, the Harrell Center’s global impact might be surprising to some, but global involvement has proven beneficial on numerous fronts.

Dr. Pnina S. Klein, a clinical and developmental psychologist and professor of education at Bar-Ilan University in Israel, recently led a Mediational Intervention for Sensitizing Caregivers workshop on campus to promote cognitive functioning and attachment by improving parent-caregiver interactions with infants and young children.

Attendees included community professionals, physicians and COPH students, faculty and staff.  Dr. Robert Nelson, a joint professor in COPH and the Morsani College of Medicine, sponsored attendance by a visiting group of physicians and clinicians from Ecuador.

“It’s been used all over the world,” Coulter said of MISC. “The outcomes internationally of this program have shown that it’s very effective in strengthening attachment and reducing child maltreatment, so we brought Dr. Klein here from Israel this year to do a training for community people and staff here, as well as faculty and students.”

Dr. Martha Coulter, Harrell Center founding director (right in both photos), in Ecuador in 2007.

Elsewhere on the international front, Coulter is working with the medical school in Panama to begin collecting information and developing guidelines for Panamanian health providers to improve their responses to intimate partner violence. She’s also working in Quito, Ecuador, to develop a program that will provide fundamental intervention services for indigenous populations.

Children in a remote Himalayan village in India read books sent to them by the Harrell Center.

Coulter went to India in 2012 with a group that collected data on maternal/child health and family violence among the 26 indigenous tribes in the Himalayas as a response to one tribal leader’s interest in addressing those issues. Progress has been slow, she said, because the tribes are not formally centralized in any way, and the terrain is difficult and isolating. The center recently collected books to send to children there. A librarian navigates dirt paths on a bicycle to deliver them.

Not surprisingly, Coulter’s five-year vision for the Harrell Center is about more expansion, mostly ideological, and lots of it.

“I would like to expand our depth in looking at female offenders and the way the courts respond to them,” she said.

“We’ve applied for some grants to look with a lot more depth at issues related to fathers. This is an area that has been somewhat neglected and needs a lot of attention. What are the ways that we can help fathers from the very beginning develop the kinds of skills that will be more nurturing and less likely to produce problems?

“As far as the center itself,” she said, “I think the area that we really need to expand the most is our capacity for doing community training and education and technical assistance.”

“I’d also like to see us focus on more primary intervention in a public health direction.   A lot of what we’ve done has been secondary response intervention, but I would like to see us working with primary situations – families, parent-child relationships.”

Coulter said an example of the center’s involvement in this area is its participation in the Hillsborough County Violence Prevention Collaborative, a plan for reducing violence throughout the county.

Community events also make Coulter’s expansion list. Recent ones have included fundraisers with artists and bands, and even a biker run.

“I would like to see us expand these community events, because they have been very helpful. The center doesn’t have much funding,” she said, “and the funding that we get is almost always research funding, so if we want to do things that are outside the research arena, we have to raise the money ourselves.”

Story by David Brothers, College of Public Health. Photos courtesy of Dr. Martha Coulter, Eric Younghans, Dr. Robert Nelson, USF Health and the Harrell Center.

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First published on May 8, 2020 in observance of the COPH’s 35^th anniversary celebration.

The Sunshine Education and Research Center (Sunshine ERC) located in the USF College of Public Health is one of 18 National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) education and research centers across the nation that provides interdisciplinary training of occupational safety and health professionals.

The Sunshine ERC, which was founded in 1997, offers programs collaboratively with the Colleges of Medicine, Nursing, and Arts and Sciences and focuses on evidence-based practice and research, continuing education and outreach.

“Over the years this continuing education program evolved into a vehicle to provide low cost opportunities for professional development,” said Dr. Thomas E. Bernard, USF College of Public Health professor and Sunshine ERC center director. “The scope of the center also increased with pilot project research training and more opportunities for interdisciplinary activities.”

According to Bernard, USF COPH’s Drs. Yehia Hammad, Stuart Brooks and Pete Rentos had a vision for starting a NIOSH-supported education and research center that would be the first new center in a decade.

“As funded, the Sunshine ERC was the umbrella for industrial hygiene, occupational medicine and occupational health nursing with a nascent continuing education program. We then added occupational safety and occupational health psychology (OHP)­­—the first ERC to have an OHP program,” he said.

Bernard and Dr. Candance Burns of the College of Nursing, assumed leadership of the Sunshine ERC in 2008.

According to Bernard, with growing support from NIOSH, the Sunshine ERC affiliated with the University of Puerto Rico (UPR), expanded interdisciplinary activities and enhanced outreach into underserved populations.

“This momentum carried us into the current funding cycle with the addition of UCF to support research training directed at the hospitality industry, Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University for a new vision of occupational safety, and programs with UPR in disaster resilience for workers. Further, we now have a supported online program in health, safety and environment,” Bernard said.

The Sunshine ERC focuses on providing training that reflects the needs of key industries in Florida and emerging issues of the nation.

“Students in the Sunshine ERC receive solid training in their chosen field,” Bernard said. “The real value-added is further experience in interdisciplinary activities to better prepare them for the practice of occupational health, safety and wellness.”

Trainees spend time with peers from across disciplines in public health, nursing, and medicine at USF, psychology at USF and UCF, hospitality at UCF, and aviation at Embry-Riddle, according to Bernard.

“Each trainee is enrolled in a degree program within their institution,” Bernard said. “It is the interdisciplinary experience that takes them beyond their specific discipline.”

For example, Bernard explained, trainees are expected to attend one ERC-wide session that provides information of interest to all.

“This varies a little and includes responsible conduct of research, general principles of occupational health, safety and wellness, and team building exercises,” he said.

Trainees are also encouraged to attend national symposiums and also contribute and participate in research projects sponsored by the ERC and its faculty.

Zach Brandes-Powell, a second year occupational exposure science student in the COPH, said the Sunshine ERC has expanded his experience level as a student. 

“The mentoring and encouragement of the professors and members of the ERC have helped to push me to do things I wouldn’t have thought I was capable of with my current level of experience,” he said.  “For example, through the ERC’s support, I was able to co-present on the benefit of internships for occupational safety and health students and professionals at the American Industrial Hygiene Conference and Exposition (AIHCE). With their encouragement, I also started to offer to tutor students taking industrial hygiene related courses. These opportunities have helped me to develop skills that will be beneficial to me in life and throughout my career in occupational safety and industrial hygiene.”

Brandes-Powell said going to AIHCE 2019 has been a highlight for him.

“We were able to meet students from ERCs around the country and interact with alumni of the program. The impact that the ERC has on its students was evident as the current students instantly found common ground with the alumni when talking about our courses and projects,” he said.

Miriam Escobar, also a second-year occupational exposure science student in the COPH, said the Sunshine ERC has helped her expand her networking abilities with professionals from other disciplines.  

“Now, I am part of a diversified professional network with a common goal to improve the safety and health of others in various occupational industries,” she said.

She said the highlight of her experience so far has been the ability to participate in the Puerto Rico Resiliency focus group research.

“I was able to travel to Puerto Rico and hear first hand how the hospitality community was not only affected by hurricane Maria but also come together and prevail,” Escobar said.

Currently, the Sunshine ERC is supporting four COVID-19 research projects through its program development fund, according to Bernard, three at USF and one at UCF.

Bernard said that while the Sunshine ERC focuses on students within the ERC disciplines, they have started to also engage students and faculty interested in disaster management.

“If students have an interest they should contact me or Ms. Kelly Freedman and we will see if there is an opportunity with current projects,” he said. “We would welcome and support expenses for some students outside the ERC to participate in interdisciplinary activities.”

Story by Anna Mayor, USF College of Public Health

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First published on December 9, 2019 in observance of the COPH’s 35^th anniversary celebration.

In 2018, the USF College of Public Health (COPH) resurrected its Public Health Executive Leadership Program, which had been dormant for 10 years.

The program aims to bring rising leaders in the Florida Department of Health (FDOH) together to “collaborate and improve upon their own as well as their agency’s effectiveness,” said Dr. Marissa Levine, a COPH professor and co-director of the program along with Dr. Anthony Masys, an associate professor and director of global disaster management, humanitarian assistance and homeland security. “We revived the program not to teach public health skills, but to bring out leadership skills.”

Last year’s program brought 28 FDOH professionals—everyone from bureau chiefs to doctors and nurses to lab executives—to the USF Tampa campus several times over the course of nine months to attend workshops and presentations. In between the sessions, the group performed online work and discussions.

“The students evaluated their own leadership skill growth at the beginning and end of the program,” explained Levine. “Based on this, we saw a significant increase in self-assessed leadership skills. In addition, each student completed a capstone project relevant to their work at their base of operations. Each project was impactful and some had the potential for state- or national-level effectiveness.”

As an added bonus, many students in the program who did not initially know each other created professional relationships. “That will not only help them personally, but it will also enhance the work and impact of the department,” noted Levine.

Hurricane season pushed back the start of this year’s program, but in November 30 FDOH workers came to campus to open the 2019 program and begin fine-tuning their leadership skills. 

“This is another dynamic group who we will meet again in person four more times between now and May. Next month we will be exploring leadership in a political context and will convene in Tallahassee where we will view committee meetings and learn about all levels of government budget and policy making,” said Levine.

The Center for Leadership in Public Health Practice, the COPH group that puts on the program, has an annual contract with the FDOH. According to Levine, the group is looking to expand its offerings to engage other public health professionals. “We’re disseminating information to our graduates and others interested in leadership so that we can create a robust resource for leaders working to collaboratively improve health and well-being,” said Levine

.Story by Donna Campisano, USF College of Public Health

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Students, staff and faculty from across the various University of South Florida and USF Health colleges gathered at the Center for Advanced Medical Learning and Simulation (CAMLS) for the USF Health 6th Annual Interprofessional Education Day. 

In the wake of a global pandemic, burnout and a variety of other mental health problems are contributing factors to hospitals being understaffed. This year’s theme “Caring for Caregivers: Fostering Mental Health and Wellness in Interprofessional Teams” focused on solutions to help combat those issues and improve the quality of patient care across the profession.   

“Our USF IPE Day working group felt it was critical to focus on this topic given the current challenges that our health care system is facing with health care professionals leaving their professions, increased provider burnout and high rates of mental health issues, including depression and suicide,” said Haru Okuda, MD, FACEP, FSSH, executive director of CAMLS and associate vice president of the USF Health Office of Interprofessional Education and Practice.

Approximately 700 people (500 virtually, 200 in person) attended the morning presentations by industry experts.  Jennifer Bickel, MD, FAAN, FAHS, chief wellness officer at Moffitt Cancer Center and professor of oncologic sciences in the USF Health Morsani College of Medicine, was the first featured speaker of the morning. Her presentation “Organizational Wellness: Expanding the Horizon of Well-being” highlighted key statistical data on the volume of patients seen by a provider experiencing burnout and steps the National Academy of Medicine is taking to increase wellness across the workforce.  

Richard Westphal, PhD, RN, FAAN, PMHCNS/NP-BC, followed Dr. Bickel.  Dr. Westphal is a professor at the University of Virginia School of Nursing and co-director of the Wisdom and Wellbeing Program at UVA Health.  His presentation “Stress First Aid: Nurturing Resilience in Health Care Professionals” focused on sources of mental stress, how the mind reacts to the stress and team-based solutions centered around well-being. 

Judy Davidson, DNP, RN, MCCM, a nurse scientist at the University of California-San Diego, was the final featured speaker of the morning. Her presentation “Saving Lives: Suicide Prevention and Health Care Interventions” focused on the suicide rates of health care professionals, re-imagining some of the available interventional tools and changing the mental health-related questions on licensing boards. 
 
The morning sessions ended after Donna Petersen, ScD, MHS, CPH, dean of the USF Health College of Public Health, senior associate vice president of USF Health and chief health officer of USF, led an interprofessional panel discussion themed “Unlocking Wellness: Exploring a Toolkit for Inner Balance and Resilience.”  Panelists gave their perspectives on the importance of health care professionals working with a healthy work-life balance and how a better work-life balance will lead to better work environments and more positive patient outcomes. 
 
Panelists: 
–        Kelly Allegro, PT, DPT, board-certified clinical specialist in neurologic physical therapy, co-director of clinical education at the USF Health School of Physical Therapy and Rehabilitation Sciences
–        Kristin Kosyluk, PhD, assistant professor of Mental Health Law and Policy in the Department of Mental Health Law and Policy at the Louis de la Parte Florida Mental Health Institute, director of the STigma Action Research (STAR) Lab
–        Abraham A. Salinas-Miranda, MD, PhD, MACE, CDVS, assistant professor, director of the Harrell Center for the Study of Family Violence, associate director of the USF Health College of Public Health Center of Excellence in Maternal and Child Health Education Science and Practice
–        Chris Simmons, PhD, LCSW, associate director and associate professor, USF College of Behavioral and Community Sciences School of Social Work

Anthony Masys, CD, PhD, associate professor at the USF Health College of Public Health.

Kicking off the afternoon was Anthony Masys, CD, PhD, associate professor at the USF Health College of Public Health and an international expert in applied systems thinking, design thinking and futures thinking. He gave his presentation titled “Strength-Based Approach: Appreciative Inquiry.” Appreciative inquiry is more commonly known as a strength-based approach to systems change as it emphasizes generating positive ideas instead of identifying negative problems.  

Part of the appreciative inquiry model is using rich pictures to help diagram a way of relating personal experiences and perceptions to situations by linking a series of concepts.  
 
Dr. Masys’ presentation provided the foundation of the group activity and team competition for the event. 

Students split into interprofessional teams of nine to put the concept of appreciative inquiry into practice. Students shared good and bad examples of well-being in their workspaces and colleges and offered solutions on how to enhance the good examples and improve the bad examples.  
 
With the guidance of their faculty preceptors, teams used rich pictures to generate mind maps that illustrated how they plan to improve the overall provider well-being of an organization. Using a “Shark Tank” format, the teams presented their concepts to the sharks in hopes they will buy their concept. 

Sharks (judges):
–        Karen Aul, PhD, RN, CNE, CHSE, USF Health College of Nursing
–        Jennifer Bickel, MD, FAAN, FAHS, Moffitt Cancer Center
–        Somer Burke, EdD, MPH, CPH, USF Health College of Public Health
–        Joe Ford, JD, USF Health Shared Student Services
–        Vickie Lynn, PhD, MSW, MPH, USF College of Behavioral and Community Sciences
 
The IPE Day group activity was designed to encourage interprofessional collaboration among learners through hands-on activity. Teams worked together to conceptualize a strategic vision for how wellness can be operationalized to support organizational and personal wellness. The goals of the activity were to:
–        Understand the application of appreciative inquiry as a strength-based approach to navigating various solutions in the health care domain.
–        Apply a system-thinking approach via rich pictures to support ideation in exploring the problem space from an interdisciplinary perspective.
–        Translate insights from the rich pictures into a mind map to develop a strategic implementation strategy supporting wellness. 
 
One by one, teams presented their concept to the sharks. Teams had three minutes to make compelling arguments about why their concept is the best. 

The sharks narrowed down the field to three teams who then had to prepare a one-minute elevator pitch of their concept to give to the audience. Audience members voted for the winner electronically at the end of the pitches. When the votes were counted, Team Five emerged as the winner. The team’s approach focused on a solution that centered around employees finding balance within their work environment. 

Winning team:
Erini Serag-Bolos, PharmD, associate professor at the USF Health Taneja College of Pharmacy (Preceptor)
Camilla Cardona, USF Health Morsani College of Medicine Physician Assistant Program
Hayden Euper, USF Health School of Physical Therapy and Rehabilitation Sciences
Christopher Guskie, USF Health Morsani College of Medicine
Rebekah Minter, USF Health Athletic Training Program
Madison Moua, USF Health College of Public Health
Paul Munoz, School of Social Work, College of Behavioral and Community Sciences
Amiah Price, USF Health College of Nursing
Jenna Sabbagh, USF Health Taneja College of Pharmacy

The names of the winning team will the engraved on the IPE Day trophy.  As the team preceptor, Dr. Serag-Bolos will keep the trophy in her office until the USF Health 7th Annual IPE Day. 

Story reposted from USF Health

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