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 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.

The post COPH helped drive state’s bicycle helmet law appeared first on College of Public Health News.

First published on July 13, 2015 in observance of the COPH’s 30^th anniversary celebration.

Jodi Ray is a bundle of energy when she talks about the project that has become her life’s work, Florida Covering Kids and Families, which is a part of the Lawton and Rhea Chiles Center for Healthy Mothers and Babies.

The founding program director was Mary Figg, a state representative for Hillsborough County.  After a year or two of preliminary maneuvers, the initiative began formally in 1999.  Figg had enlisted Ray, who has a master’s degree in mass communications, the year before to be program coordinator and handle all things media, including assisting her with crafting the successful request for that all-important initial grant.

“My job was to manage a multimedia campaign.  I’ve done a lot of mass communications on this job,” she said.  “In fact, I’d say I do more of that than anything else.”

The project was funded its first seven years by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation to do outreach enrollment of children eligible for the Children’s Health Insurance Program and Medicaid.  During that time, a staff of two more than doubled to five by 2006, then, when that funding ended, was cut all too literally in half, reduced to a project director, a coordinator and a half-time assistant: essentially, a staff of 2-1/2.  Fortunately, they had a dedicated network behind them.

Jodi Ray

“We have a state coalition,” Ray said, “a large collaboration of partners from around the state and local coalitions in almost every community in the state.  We came together and said, ‘Our mission is to get uninsured into coverage.’”

The coalition was initially mandated by the RWJF grant, Ray said.  It remains active today and includes some of its original members.  No question, it answered a critical need in 2006, when half the staff was asked to keep up with an exponential work-load increase created three years earlier.

Crying on the phone

“In 2003,” she explained, “the state ended all outreach efforts for CHIP.  So they literally boxed everything up and sent it to me.  They gave me their contact lists and all of their partnerships and said, ‘Could you please take this on?’  Now granted, there were no financial resources with that at the time.”

“The state also closed enrollment for CHIP in Florida for 18 months.  As a result of that, we lost over 300,000 kids in the Florida KidCare program.  In one month alone, we lost 40,000 kids.

“There was no statewide outreach initiative except us,” she said, “me and my other 1-1/2 people.  The number of calls I got was unbelievable.  People were calling and crying.  It was terrible.”

That situation started Ray on an 18-month crusade, talking to newspaper editorial boards, legislators, community leaders, almost anyone who would listen.

Committed to moving forward, she and the coalition began implementing a plan that was as innovative as it was aggressive:  Sign up as many kids as possible to a waiting list.  When the list reached 120,000, the New York Times took notice and gave the state a boatload of blistering press.  Not long after, the governor issued an executive order to enroll all the kids on the list, and open enrollment returned permanently four months later.

In 2007, a new governor, Charlie Crist, declared the uninsured rate among children appalling.  He brought the state agencies together, Ray said, and told them to figure out how to make it better, and fast.

“One of the things they did was decide to give us some resources,” Ray said.

A state contract and marketing materials soon followed, along with help from state agency staffs on routine but time-consuming matters like mailing.  Growth was back, and with it, ramped-up after-school activities and more engagement with local businesses.

The results since have ranged from impressive to remarkable.  Since the first open enrollment period began on Oct. 1, 2013, the project has gained national media coverage for enrolling about 2.5 million previously uninsured Floridians, twice the expectation.

“We expanded to focus on all the newly eligible uninsured to help them get into whatever coverage options are available,” Ray said, “whether under the Affordable Care Act in the marketplace or Medicaid or CHIP.  One way or another, we were going to help people who didn’t have coverage get health insurance so they could get access to health care services.

“Health care services are important, and having preventive care, all those things.  We talk about all those things being necessary, but you’re not getting in the door unless you have health insurance.  So that’s what we focus on: the first step, getting people in the door.”

That may be the focus, but there’s plenty more to do.

“We also do one-on-one application,” she said.  “We have consumers that actually sit down with us and do enrollment.  We do everything that involves connecting people to health coverage.

“We even do some health literacy.  How do you use health insurance?  How do you make an appointment to see a doctor?  For many of the uninsured, these are not obvious.”

“We work with all the agencies on both the state and federal levels that are involved in implementing health coverage, and we get out there and shake the bushes.”

Media and more

As much effort as is spent on finding the uninsured, many do find FCKF first, Ray said.

“We get cold calls for everything,” she said.  “I used to wonder sometimes how people find us, but I don’t wonder that anymore.  All you have to do is help somebody.  Then that person gives your number to somebody else.  We get a lot of calls by word of mouth.  We helped someone at some point, and even years later, we get a call from that person’s family member or friend who needs help.”

“The things that consumers come in here and tell you are unbelievable, sometimes heartbreaking.  That’s the other thing that’s really tough,” she said.  “I’ve gotten calls that have made me literally get up and walk around the building a few times because the stories are terrible: the family living in a car; the kid who’s got some kind of horrible heart condition; the mother who had CHIP coverage, but something went wrong with her renewal, it got dropped, it’s Christmastime and she has no money because the asthma medication she had to pick up for her son cost $400.”

While grants provide the funding, the University of South Florida and College of Public Health make it work, Ray said.

“Our work has been very well supported by both the College of Public Health and the University.  I say this out loud every day:  I don’t think anybody doing this work could be in a better place.  I don’t think there’s any way Dr. Petersen could support our work any more than she does.  We get so much support from one end of this university to the other, and we worked with everybody through open enrollment.”

Student Health Services, the libraries, the Morsani College of Medicine and the Marshall Center were regular haunts, as were the St. Petersburg and Sarasota-Manatee campuses.

From the beginning, Ray, who became director upon Figg’s retirement in 2003, has been the media go-to person from the beginning, and that responsibility has grown as exponentially as the project itself.

“We do four press conferences a year.  I spend a ridiculous amount of time talking to reporters.  Just in the first open enrollment period alone, I probably did 80 or 90 interviews with reporters from one end of the country to the other.”

The result was major articles in The New Yorker, the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times, to name a few, as well as pieces widely disseminated by the Associated Press and Reuters, as well as personal visits from two national health secretaries.

Ray on Capitol Hill in a nationally televised discussion.

“During the first open enrollment period, we had the second-largest grant in the country,” Ray said.  “That, in itself, drew attention, and [U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius] came here, herself, and awarded the grant.  She came to the college, and that’s how I found out we’d gotten the grant.”

It’s little wonder, then, that what began with two people 17 years ago keeps a dozen in the USF office busy with training, policy work, education, outreach, grant-writing, communications, etc.  It’s an office full of multi-taskers, Ray said.

“We all do all of it,” she said.

Given the complexities of health insurance laws and regulations, not to mention a new set of rules for navigators, just keeping up is a task unto itself.

“We do have to make it a point to stay informed.  We’re constantly on webinars and trainings, reading policies and reading new rules.  We have our hands in a lot of different elements of public health, just because we have to.”

The toughest part of the job, she said, is not being able to help everyone.

“We still have a gap of folks who are not going to qualify for coverage they can afford because the state has not expanded Medicaid coverage,” she said.  “I’d like to see us be able to enroll everyone who has no access to health coverage.  I’d like to see that in less than five years, quite frankly.  I would hate for that to be a five-year goal.”

Ray makes it obvious that what she and her colleagues do at Florida Covering Kids and Families is what keeps her pumped with energy.

“It’s all very exciting,” she said.  “We’re right there at the front end of this, and that, in and of itself, is exhilarating.  I feel good about what we’ve been able to accomplish, so it’s all been worth the time and effort – and the stress and the exhaustion – because it’s paid off.  We’re actually having an impact, and people see it.”

Every flight needs a navigator

The federal navigator initiative aimed at getting people into the new health insurance marketplace has been a major focus of their work the past two years, as well as a major hallmark of their success.

“The navigators are tied specifically to the federal marketplace.” Ray explained, “Some states are not participating in the federal marketplace, but Florida happens to be one of those states that is.”

The federal program provides outreach enrollment funds.  The first funding opportunities began in 2013, Ray said, and her office applied for USF to get an award that would cover the state.  She and her team did all the grant writing.

“We had already been doing this work on the ground across the state to enroll kids in CHIP and Medicaid,” Ray said, “and many of the partners around the state had come to a consensus that it made perfect sense for us to be the applicant for this grant and take the lead.  So, what we did was look at the model that was already working and find a way to expand on that.”

The result was a $4.2-million award in 2013 to cover 64 of the state’s 67 counties, the exceptions being Broward, Miami-Dade and Monroe, which submitted their own applications separately.

“The second year,” Ray said, “we went back to those partners again and asked them if they would like to join us for the 2014 application.  They said yes the second time around, so the second time around, we covered all 67 counties in Florida.”

The second award was worth $5.3-million.  Ray’s group had secured million-dollar grants for their Children’s Health Insurance Program enrollments, but those, which  had been their largest to date, are easily dwarfed by the Navigator grants.

Most of the funds are vested in the people who get the job done, Ray said.

“A lot of people.  I’m a big believer that priority number one should be the human resource.  The folks on the ground.  The folks who are out there doing the education, the communication, the one-on-one application assistants, the people who know the processes.  We know from our history of doing this and tons of research that these are the folks who keep people from getting lost along the way through the process.”

In one regard, Ray said, the Navigator’s work has only begun with the enrollment stage.

“They help people navigate the enrollment process and get to the point where they can be enrolled and covered, and they’re also key to helping people appropriately use health insurance,” she said.  “We want folks not just to get in, but we want them to keep their coverage and to use their coverage properly.

“When you’re connecting people to health care coverage for the first time, these are not innately understood concepts.  Insurance is actually a pretty complicated idea, and if you’ve never used it, you really can get overwhelmed.  If you have it and you’re not using it, then the tendency to understand its value can be diminished.  The Navigators and the Florida KidCare application assisters on the ground are essential for that piece of it.  It’s not just about filling out the forms.”

The numbers tell just how busy those people on the ground have been.

“The first year, the projected enrollment for the federal health insurance marketplaces in Florida was around 450,000, give or take,” Ray said.  “We ended up enrolling – with all partners across the state, not just the USF partners – almost a million.  We doubled the projections, basically.

“The second year, the last number I saw was about 1.6 million, but that didn’t include the last month, the limited special enrollment period for people who got hit with the tax penalties.”

As impressive as those figures are, their national rank may be more so, especially given California’s stand as by far the most populous state of the union.

“The first year, every month, we came in second in the country to California,” Ray said.  “This year, our enrollment here in Florida was higher than enrollment in any other state in the country.  It’s a pretty successful initiative in Florida.”

That seems understated, especially considering that it was the work of about 90 Navigators the first enrollment period and around 150 the second round.  Ray was quick to note, however, that Navigators weren’t the only people involved.

“There are more resources that go into managing this than just the enrollment folks,” she said.  “We have IT people involved, we have human resource people involved, we have grant administrators involved.  It’s an undertaking, for sure.  It’s all a team effort.”

A niche in the state’s public health

The stakes, along with the numbers, will be higher for the third round, since the funding will be for three years.  Ray is undaunted by the change and, in fact, favors it.  For one thing, it will provide greater continuity in enrollment services, she said.

“We won’t have the start-up delays that come with a grant ending,” she explained, “and then waiting for another grant to come in.”

Given the early success but also knowing the nature of the funding world, Ray is cautiously optimistic about future Navigator grants.

“We’re keeping our fingers crossed,” she said.  “I feel like we’ve done a good job.  I think our outcomes have been really high.  Our partners at the federal level seem very pleased with the work that we’re doing.

“Florida certainly has been a shining star all the way through this.  Not because I was optimistic, but because I believed we were doing the right thing and that we knew what we were doing, I’m not surprised.  Because we didn’t go into this making up a plan of action.  We went into it with a sense of how it can be done, what the best practices were.  We had learned our lessons along the way.  We didn’t have to reinvent the wheel to do this.  All our collaborative partners made a big difference, too.

“I feel pretty good going into years three through five.  It’s going to be harder going into these years, because we’ve enrolled so many of the low-hanging fruit, so we really have to hone in on who we’re missing and whatever we need to do to make sure we’re not leaving people behind.

“This is our niche for the state of Florida in public health.  Whether it’s obesity or diabetes or getting cancer screenings, it’s very difficult for people to do anything about those things we talk about in public health if they don’t have health insurance.  So, I think we’re doing something valuable in contributing that first step to addressing some of these important public health issues that are so important.”

Story by David Brothers, College of Public Health.  Graphics courtesy of Florida Covering Kids and Families, CSPAN and Jodi Ray.

The post Kids and Families, navigator grants hallmarks of college’s state and national presence appeared first on College of Public Health News.

First published on July 13, 2015 in observance of the COPH’s 30^th anniversary celebration.

Founded in 1997 by a training grant supported by the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, the Sunshine Education and Research Center at the USF College of Public Health stemmed from an industrial hygiene training program grant in the late 1980s.

“NIOSH has several charters,” explained Dr. Thomas Bernard, chair and professor in Environmental and Occupational Health and SERC (pronounced SIR-see) program director since 2008.  “One of them is to support and encourage the development of professionals in the field of occupational safety and health.  A mechanism for doing that is through training grants.”

After Bernard’s arrival in 1989, additional training program grants followed in occupational medicine and occupational health nursing.  Then the department began work on an occupational safety program.  Eight years later, the fledgling operation had grown enough to warrant centralization.

“In the mid-’90s,” Bernard said, “we decided that we would combine those training activities with a grant and ask for an education center.  The application required that it have training in at least three programs, and we had four: safety, industrial hygiene, medicine and nursing.  The application was accepted and funded under the leadership of Stuart M. Brooks and Yehia Hammad.”

Being headquartered at a university the size of USF naturally leads any interdisciplinary entity into an expansion cornucopia that Bernard is happy to enumerate, along with the USF colleges involved.

“Because they are multidiscipline programs, part of their value is the interdisciplinary training,” he said.  “We added, about seven years ago, occupational health psychology, so that’s now a funded program in Arts and Sciences.  We’ve expanded the safety program to include a degree out of engineering.  Obviously, we’re involved with the [Morsani] College of Medicine:  The clinical rotations and residency certificates come out of medicine, and then the academic training comes out of public health.

“With nursing,” he said, “we have three options.  One is a straight occupational health nursing degree, a second one is a dual degree in nursing and public health, and then we also have a third degree that’s strictly public health.”

Thomas Bernard, PhD

Another requirement under the grant from NIOSH, which is part of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, is a continuing education component,  which also has been added.  Additional expansion has stemmed from outreach activities, student recruitment and a pilot project in research training for doctoral students and junior faculty.

“We support these throughout the region,” Bernard qualified, “so they aren’t only for USF.  We have reached way beyond ourselves in terms of the arrangements that we have, but we engage the professional community more than the community at large.”

He added that the center is “very much engaged” in state and regional professional conferences, as well as in coordination with other ERCs in the state and the region.

“By and large, we have a very good national profile,” he said.  “There are just a couple of us that reach out globally, but those are more individual efforts.  The ERC is designed to serve primarily Florida, and in a larger sense, the Southeast region.  That’s our mission and our charter from NIOSH, not to go beyond that, but I think we have expertise in a number of areas that have national recognition.”

The highly technical nature of some of those areas probably help limit recognition to professional circles, but their significance would be difficult to deny. Respiratory protection from nanoparticles is one of them, but as Bernard pointed out, it’s not exactly a topic on most people’s minds.

“Few people are asking, ‘What happens when you breathe those in?’  Some of them have characteristics that are not unlike asbestos.  Others are easily transported across the air-blood barriers, so they move through the lungs into the blood and get transported elsewhere in the body.  So protecting individuals from nanoparticles is important,” he said.

And the list goes on.

“We have a major presence in the area of heat stress – how to evaluate heat stress, how to manage it, and especially, the effects of protective clothing.  We have fairly good recognition in Europe in the area of ergonomics,” he continued,  “and occupational health psychology clearly is one of our well-recognized programs.”

Workplace stress, safety climate and work-family balance are others, he said.

“And then,” he concluded with a nod that said he’d saved the best for last, “we turn out good students, and we’re recognized through the product of the quality of our students.”

SERC hosts a six-day Summer Institute for Occupational Health and Safety for students interested in exploring graduate studies.

Looking ahead is easy for Bernard, and he likes what he sees for his organization.

“I think that everything we do in public health, and everything we do within the SERC, is prevention – preventing people from being injured or having their health impaired,” he said.  “But I think our opportunity here at USF lies in translating research to practice and also expanding on the fact that a healthy workforce is healthy not only from controlling exposures to hazards in the workplace, but also from encouraging healthy activities outside the workplace.

“So, bringing these work and home lives together is an opportunity for us,” Bernard concluded, “and that’s where I see our future.”

Story by David Brothers, College of Public Health.

The post Sunshine Education and Research Center links multiple disciplines to improve the wellbeing of workers appeared first on College of Public Health News.

First published on June 4, 2015 in observance of the COPH’s 30^th anniversary celebration.

It was January 1998, and the Florida Board of Regents had just promoted one of USF’s fledgling entities to major status with sublimely understated efficiency.

Following authorizations for a BS in dance education, a degree of undetermined level in occupational therapy and an MS in physical therapy, it was the last of four single-sentence items in the typically dry language of officialdom, replete with redundancy and excessive capitalization, on a State University System memo to Dr. Thomas Tighe, then USF provost: “Established the Type I Lawton and Rhea Chiles Center for Healthy Mothers and Babies as a Type I Center (sic).”

The rationale for the Center’s status elevation cited the state’s “tremendous progress in improving the health status of pregnant women and infants, largely through the leadership of Gov. and Mrs. Chiles and Charles Mahan,” who was then USF College of Public Health dean.  Marked improvement in the state’s infant mortality rate was among the leading factors, along with the Center’s performance the previous two years as a Type IV center.

Mahan had envisioned a research, program and policy institute for maternal and infant health as early as 1988, according to the Center’s official timeline.  The Center’s originally intended location was the University of Florida, Mahan said, but that was before the state had established its first college of public health at USF.  By the time the Center was created a few years later, USF, with the only COPH in the state, had become the obvious location, and Mahan had been named COPH dean.

Charles Mahan, MD, former USF College of Public Health dean

“Gov. and Mrs. Chiles had a lot of allegiance to the University of Florida, where they met and where he got his law degree,” Mahan said.  “I was state health officer on loan from the medical school at Florida, and I was supposed to go back there, and the Chiles Center was supposed to be there.”

But having served in the same administration, Mahan was friends with Betty Castor, who had been state secretary of education under Chiles and had since become president of USF.  Mahan said she called him and personally asked him to be the dean of COPH.  He accepted, and the first “steal” from the University of Florida only naturally led to the second.

USF was the better location for the Chiles Center, Castor told the governor, as it had the only college of public health and was headed by a dean who had served him as state health officer.  It also had a Healthy Beginnings program in place that arguably was already doing some of the work the Chiles Center would do.

Dr. Betty Castor, former USF president and Florida secretary of education.  To her left is her husband, former Florida state Rep. Samuel P. Bell III.

The Florida Healthy Start Program had been created by the legislature in 1991, under the urging of Chiles, and from its inception, had included a Healthy Beginnings Program at USF.  So when Mahan was appointed COPH dean in February 1995, he was at the right place at the right time to begin realization of his vision.  A year later, the Board of Regents established the Center, and Mahan served as its founding director in addition to his duties as COPH dean.

A $2-million federal grant followed in 1997 that was specifically aimed at reducing infant mortality in Hillsborough County.  In December of that year, a gala event at Busch Gardens honored the governor and his wife and formally launched the Center.  Additional state funding came in 1998 for construction of a building and a $600,000 annual operating budget.

Former Florida first lady Rhea Chiles (third from right) and her and the late governor’s daughter, also named Rhea (fourth from right), and son Ed (center) at the Chiles Center’s groundbreaking ceremony.

“President Castor invited Gov. and Mrs. Chiles down to USF, and we toured the campus and got them to put their names on the Chiles Center,” Mahan recalled.  “And then, Gov. Chiles was great about taking me to Washington and meeting all the senators who were his friends and raising money for the building.”

That journey for federal support brought home another $800,000 for the building.  The governor and first lady then spearheaded a series of fundraisers in Daytona Beach, Lakeland, Pensacola, Tallahassee and West Palm Beach.

“The Center was originally housed in office space near Tampa International Airport on Mariner Drive,” recalled Dr. Linda A. Detman, research associate for the Center.  “I believe that was from 1996 to 1998.  The Center’s first on-campus location was in FMHI, what is now labeled on maps as the College of Behavioral & Community Sciences building.  We also had a pair of temporary trailers for added office space between FMHI and the Westside Conference Center.”

Gov. Lawton Chiles (right) and daughter Rhea with Dr. Harold Varmus, then director of the National Institutes of Health, at the dedication of Lawton Chiles House (not related to the Chiles Center).

The Center’s impressive home since 2001 puts plenty of inspiration on display for visitors and staff alike:  A photo gallery of Gov. and Mrs. Chiles, including framed moments with presidents Clinton, Carter and Bush the first; a replica of the governor’s Tallahassee conference room for his use whenever he visited; even a bronzed pair of “Walkin’ Lawton’s” famous shoes.

After all, inspiration is what it’s all about.  Over the years, the Chiles Center’s health care initiatives have racked up impressive victories, to say the least.

“At the Chiles Center, Florida Covering Kids and Families and its collaborators across the state exceeded the federal goal for Florida in enrolling people for health care coverage in the federal health insurance marketplaces,” said Dr. William M. Sappenfield, Chiles Center director and Department of Community and Family Health chair and professor.  “During the first open enrollment, about 500,000 more individuals enrolled over the initial target and reached more than 1.6 million after the second enrollment period.  Moreover, because of the success of projects like this, Florida now enrolls more people through this important health insurance program than any other state.”

William M. Sappenfield, MD, MPH, director of the Chiles Center

Sappenfield also points to one of the Center’s most recent projects, the Florida Perinatal Quality Collaborative, which has radically reduced elective early deliveries (before 39 weeks of gestation).

“Babies electively delivered before 39 weeks are at higher risk of poor outcomes, including respiratory troubles and difficulties feeding, and are at higher risk of learning, behavioral and school-related problems in childhood,” explained Detman, who oversees the project.

“It continues to make a measurable difference in the quality of health care that mothers and babies are receiving,” Sappenfield said, “through improving newborn health care at birth and reducing death and morbidity to obstetric hemorrhage.”

Another recent Chiles Center project is the Obstetric Hemorrhage Initiative begun in October 2013 with 31 Florida and four North Carolina hospitals.  The participating Florida hospitals represent more than one-forth of the state’s delivery hospitals and nearly two-thirds of all births statewide, Detman said, adding that maternal deaths from postpartum hemorrhage are the leading cause of maternal mortality in the state.

Linda Detman, PhD, program manager for the Chiles Center’s Florida Perinatal Quality Collaborative

“We are fortunate to have the enthusiasm and dedication of perinatal professionals across the state who want to be engaged in improving outcomes for mothers and infants, and we plan to grow in the number of hospitals actively engaged in one or more of our projects,” she said.

Though funding issues put an end to the Center’s branch office in Tallahassee years ago, the original main office – now an imposing office building – on the USF Tampa campus continues to thrive and achieve.

“As was initially dreamed, the Chiles Center continues to improve the health and health care of women, children and families in Florida,” Sappenfield said.  “We will continue to build upon and expand these successful collaborations to succeed in our mission of improving their health and health care.”

Gov. Chiles visits COPH and its dean, Dr. Charles Mahan, in 1995.

“We worked with Gov. and Mrs. Chiles for many years to devise and implement programs and ideas to improve the pregnancy outcomes for women and babies,” Mahan said.  “The LRCC is designed to carry out these efforts and continue to design and improve new ones for future generations.”

Story by David Brothers, College of Public Health.

The post Chiles Center promotes health for all women and babies appeared first on College of Public Health News.

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

Dr. Carol Bryant was on the ground floor of the USF College of Public Health’s social marketing program when the social marketing field was in its infancy.  She credits Dr. Stan Graven, chair of the Department of Community and Family Health at the time, for the idea of a social marketing conference.

“He asked me to start a conference,” Bryant said.  “He said, ‘I think the field of social marketing has enough popularity and potential.  We need a conference on it.’”

Dr. Carol Bryant

Bryant, now USF Distinguished Health Professor in Community and Family Health, believes Graven’s own conference had convinced him of the viability of conferences in general, and specifically their ability to facilitate broad networking among stakeholders in any given field.

“It’s had a really major impact on his field,” Bryant said of what has become known as the Gravens conference, “so he could see that a conference in social marketing might be able to do the same thing.  He realized that a national conference could bring people together, disseminate the ideas, make a significant contribution to the public health community, and probably be good for branding USF.”

Bryant assented despite never having done anything of the kind or having any real idea of how to go about it.

She enlisted the help of Judy Sommers, who was at that time in charge of organizing COPH events.  She traveled to the nation’s capital to consult with two people at CDC who were well known in social marketing to ask whom to invite to speak.  She even began to think that putting a conference together might not be so difficult, after all.

“We had a really dynamic lineup of all the really active social marketers in the United States,” she said.  “We paid them all for their travel and a pretty good honorarium to come.  We promoted the conference, and we had 71 people.”

So far, so good.  There was just one problem.

“Forty or 50 of them were speakers,” she recalled, “so we lost a bundle of money.”

Bryant concluded then that the inaugural social marketing conference would also be the last, but she had a believer in Graven.

“Stan had the vision and courage to say, ‘Nope, we’re going to do it again.  Only this time, we’re not going to lose money, so let’s see how we can cut back on the budget and do better promotion.’”

Flanked by a cadre of congratulatory colleagues, Bryant (center) received a special recognition they presented her at the 2014 Social Marketing Conference.

The result was a second conference that turned the tide.  Smaller honoraria and fewer speakers fixed the early financial faux pas, along with the discovery within a few years that the honoraria could be dropped altogether.  There was enough interest in social marketing and enough respect for the conference that speakers would pay their own way to take part, and holding it at a beachfront resort didn’t hurt.

“Stan was absolutely right,” Bryant said.  “The conference would take the approach of social marketing and disseminate it in a way we couldn’t just through publications and my flying around and talking about it.”

Still, she said, social marketing’s early days at USF were lean at best.

“The early days were real tough financially,” she said.  “I was pretty terrified, actually, about how to do something like this.  Fortunately, we had good people – first Judy Sommers and then Ginger Phillips, and now Bobbi Rose – to do all the conference planning, but I didn’t realize I could just sit back and let them do that.  In the first years, I felt like, ‘Oh, my gosh, I have to learn how to do this.’”

In those early years, the Social Marketing Conference, the first of its kind anywhere, was pretty much the extent of social marketing, said Bryant, who also co-directs the Florida Prevention Research Center, a CDC-funded entity that develops and evaluates a community-based approach to social marketing.

“We did not have what we came to call the training academy yet, or the field school,” she said.  “I think I was teaching an Introduction to Social Marketing course at that time.”

Persistence pays

Bryant’s long-time social marketing partner is also her long-time partner in the bigger sense, her husband, James Lindenberger, director and faculty administrator of the Social Marketing Group.  When social marketing was launched at COPH, Lindenberger was not yet at USF, but was nonetheless a major catalyst in the start of social marketing at the university.  Together, he and Bryant founded Best Start Social Marketing, a nonprofit marketing agency with an innately symbiotic relationship with social marketing at USF.  Lindenberger was its executive director for its first 15 years.  He also is founder and former publisher of Social Marketing Quarterly, the first peer-reviewed journal dedicated to social marketing.

James Lindenberger

“Much of the work that we did, whether at our agency or at USF, was really done collaboratively between the two,” Lindenberger recalled.  While agreeing that the Social Marketing Conference drove at least the USF entry into the field, and probably more, he shared Bryant’s recollection of a shaky start.

“It was the first conference we’d ever put on,” he said.  “We didn’t know what we were doing, exactly, but we did have a lot of people who were instrumental in the field of social marketing, which was still a very young discipline.  We had a lot of what we thought were the important folks in the field do the presentations.”

One of those people, Lindenberger said, was Alan Andreasen, now a marketing professor at Georgetown University and executive director of the Social Marketing Institute.

“We asked him to be the closing speaker and add an exclamation point to the conference,” Lindenberger said.  “So, after a day-and-a-half of presentations, Alan got up and said, ‘Well, I want to tell you all that none of you know what social marketing is.  You’re completely wrong.’  He then proceeded to spend about 35 or 40 minutes telling us how much we had messed up.”

Lindenberger and Bryant at the recent COPH Alumni Awards

Bryant and Lindenberger laughed heartily as they recalled the incident, but said they were far from finding it amusing at the time.

“We were furious.  You left the room,” Lindenberger said, nodding to Bryant, who agreed.

“I got up,” she said, “and was just pacing in the hallway thinking, ‘I can’t take this.’”

“We were really furious,” Lindenberger continued, “because this is a guy who was really important, and a lot of people looked to him, and we wanted him to come in and say, ‘Bless you.  Thank you for doing this.  Nobody else has done it before.  We appreciate it.’  Instead, he got up and basically said, ‘You idiots.’

“After a few weeks of us getting through this, it dawned on us that he was right.  His concern was that we had had almost all communications presentations.  Almost everything we talked about was promotion.  He said, ‘That’s not what we’re about.  We aren’t advertisers, we’re marketers, and marketers do a complete and holistic look at solving problems and apply those different variables to the solutions.’”

What resulted, Lindenberger said, was a dramatic redesign of the conference for the following year.

Holding a conference at a seaside resort is a good thing, as the faces of Social Marketing Conference attendees show.

“It’s been interesting,” Bryant noted.  “That mistake was made by almost everyone we invited.  They showed off all their promotional materials and were very proud to do so, and we still have trouble with trying to make sure people don’t do that, and that our audience understands that it isn’t just advertising.

“It’s very humbling that people can sit there for two days having us tell them that maybe 20 times and still try to hire us to do TV ads.  I think it’s because most people think marketing is advertising.  It’s a hard misunderstanding to correct.”

In fact, both said the term “social marketing” has long been problematic.  Technology, it might seem, is doing all it can to keep it that way.

“It’s interesting,” Bryant said.  “It’s changed from ‘Don’t call it that, because marketing is evil’ or ‘Don’t call it social marketing, because that’s social engineering.’  Now, it’s a different debate.”

“A lot of the debate,” Lindenberger said, “seems to be rooted in younger folks coming into the field who do want to be social marketers, but when they present themselves as social marketers to their peers, their bosses or their clients, those people misinterpret that to mean social media and social media marketing.  Their concern is that it’s diminishing their ability to have an impact and also diminishing their ability to have a successful career.”

“For many of us who are kind of the old guard on this,” he continued, “our belief is there’s just so much brand equity built into it.  There’s a huge array of publications and organizations and conferences that are built around social marketing.  We would have another 30 years of building the brand up.”

“But we already have lost a lot of brand equity,” Bryant countered.  “If you Google ‘social marketing,’ you’ll get social media, even social media marketing conferences.  It is a real problem.

“In the U.S. public health system, and certainly within anthropology, it was seen as advertising and manipulation,” added Bryant, an anthropologist by training.  “I had anthropology friends who just thought I had gone totally to the dark side, but public health had a real misunderstanding about it, too, until people like Marsha Walker in Texas got it right and funded a really successful program.  That program was so successful that soon, the other agencies were asking us to do projects for them.  So, as they saw it work in this country, people in public health went, ‘Wait a minute.  Whatever it’s called, this might work for us.”

“I think what happened here at USF is a very significant part of why the discipline grew as rapidly and as successfully as it did,” Lindenberger said.  “A national program that we did out of USF and Best Start was the national breastfeeding promotion campaign for the Department of Agriculture.  That became their national brand.  It’s been used in every state in the country, is still being used, and that really brought social marketing to the foreground in Washington in a way domestically that it had never been before.”

Throw me a line

That early show of strength by the program also was a very early sign of things to come for the field, “upstream” social marketing, an approach that wouldn’t have a name for many years.

“Downstream is basically going to the individual or small group to influence their behaviors to be more positive in a particular issue, health issue or whatever it may be,” Lindenberger explained.  “Upstream is trying to look at the environment, decision-makers and the other factors that actually create a situation in which people can make change more effectively and more usefully.”

“All these people are drowning in the river downstream,” Bryant offered by way of the prevailing example in the field.  “So, you throw them educational pamphlets on how to swim or pull them out one at a time.  But upstream says, ‘No, let’s find out where they’re coming from.  Is there a bridge that’s broken?  Is something giving way?  Let’s go up there and keep them getting into the river in the beginning, instead of one by one educating them on how to survive.’  It’s a powerful metaphor, and it is catching on.”

Lindenberger noted that early applications of upstream social marketing significantly predate the metaphor.  While the national breastfeeding campaign was being developed in 1989, he said, Bryant and a pair of colleagues went to Capitol Hill and lobbied Congress for funding.

Social marketing at work at the Social Marketing Conference

“It had never been done before,” Lindenberger said, “and after that lobbying effort, $8-million was set aside specifically for breastfeeding promotion and management to be dispersed throughout the country in the WIC program.  That was upstream.  The very first project we ever did was as upstream as it gets.”

Bryant credits Andreasen for helping to widely disseminate the metaphoric term – source unknown – that has become a directional imperative for social marketing over the past decade, as well as numerous others for driving it forward.

“Many speakers at our conference, Bill Smith and Gerard Hastings from Scotland, especially, brought that metaphor alive for us and nudged us to go more upstream,” Bryant said, “and then our critics like Larry Wallach were saying the same thing,” which was that the downstream approach was blaming the victims, chiding them for not knowing how to swim well enough to save themselves.

“All those forces came together at the same time, and public health had the same realization.  We said, ‘Wait a minute.  We’d be really stupid to keep going downstream.  Let’s come up with a model that takes social marketing upstream,’ so that’s what we’ve done for the last 10 years – develop the model and test it out, and now, we’re training people in it.

“I’m hoping it will really take off.  It is more difficult to get funding, but it is more sustainable, too.”

This year, social marketing at USF COPH added to its impressive list of accolades the nation’s first MPH with a social marketing concentration.  Last year, the program celebrated the revision and re-launch of its social marketing training web site in conjunction with the Florida Prevention Research Center.  There is excitement over the field’s burgeoning relationships with other disciplines, namely engineering (humanitarian engineers) and a long-standing but still growing symbiosis with anthropology.  There also is that strengthening upstream trend.

Which way do we go?

But with all its successes, expansion, diversification and partnering, social marketing nonetheless remains a relatively new field in a time when a digital communications explosion can threaten to turn almost anything into a shape-shifter.  While few would argue that 44 successful years likely points toward anything less than a positive future, identifying potential threats can hardly be seen as unwise.

So, just where is social marketing headed?  In arguably its adolescence, what will it look like fully grown?  Who better to ask than two people who have nurtured it from infancy?

“I see a lot of dangers ahead,” Bryant said, “the big one being the brand equity diminishing because of confusion with social media marketing, and I’m not sure where I stand on the argument.  But I’m at this point kind of leaning toward maybe we do change our name, or do a qualification to it, ‘social marketing for behavior change,’ or something like that to help clarify that we’re not social media.

“Like anything, it peaks and then it falls,” she said, “and I resisted doing an MPH in social marketing, because I was afraid it was just an approach and its popularity might wane, and people with that degree – other people wouldn’t even know what they did.  I think those are some dangers that are real, but there are now so many people active in the field around the world.  We have two list serves, two journals, two conferences, and we’re thousands strong instead of just a hundred, so I think those fears are probably not warranted.”

“I agree with that,” Lindenberger offered.  “They’re not warranted.  We differ over the name issue and social media marketing.  I’m fairly comfortable with the fact that people sometimes get confused, and we can help them learn more about it if we have the chance to engage them.  And I also don’t really care.  I think we and other social marketers continue to do what we do, and if we do it well, if we produce the product successfully and deliver something to their audiences that they really need and want that will help them accomplish their own missions, then we’re fine.”

After discussing the future they anticipate for social marketing, it was time to consider the one they’d like to see.

A student poster presentation at the conference

“Something I think will happen – we’re already seeing it – that I would like more of is social marketing moving out of public health,” Bryant said.  “I think our conference taught people in public health how to apply social marketing.  Only more recently have we attracted people from other fields and changed our name from Social Marketing in Public Health to just Social Marketing Conference.

“It since then has also taken off in environmental protection.  A man named Doug McKenzie Moore, who’s a good trainer and has a wonderful web site and a list serve, has really spread it around the world for people who are working in recycling and all kinds of things.  We’re working with Qatar now to do the same thing in transportation.  Some social marketers want to see it in finance helping people to manage their finances better.

“So, what I’m hoping happens is it really does move out of just public health applications, because it could work so well in other arenas.  Healthy People 2020 has a set of objectives related to social marketing, and they want to see, by 2020, more health departments using social marketing.  I’d like to see state health departments really use it.  And the other set of objectives in Healthy People 2020 is that all schools of public health will offer at least a course in social marketing.”

“I’d like to see it be a degree program in a lot of universities around the country,” Lindenberger said.  “I think that would be a way for this to really take off – that people see it as a legitimate credential that helps them get jobs and provides them with tools to be able to influence positive change.”

Story by David Brothers, College of Public Health.

The post Pioneers of social marketing discuss its founding and its future appeared first on College of Public Health News.

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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Originally from the Midwest, USF College of Public Health (COPH) alum Michelle Pizarro and her family moved to Largo, Fla., when she was an infant.

After graduating with her bachelors in humanities and religious studies from USF in 2007, Pizarro said she wanted to learn more in a different field.   

“My sister was a pharmacist and came across someone with an masters in health administration (MHA) and thought it was something I would be interested in,” Pizarro said. “I wanted to work within hospitals and make a difference, but not be a physician. I did some research and saw USF had a great MHA program. It allowed me to stay local and work nearby, so I applied and haven’t looked back since!”

While earning her MHA, Pizarro’s first experience working in public health was as a student intern for James A. Haley Veterans’ Hospital in Tampa, Fla.

“I worked within various departments for a couple months at a time to learn what they did—scheduling, oncology clinic, operations and more,” she said. “It was great to see the inner workings of a hospital, but especially a veteran’s hospital which is incredibly unique. Certainly the clientele is unique, but also the staff, many of whom are veterans themselves. It was great to see how the VA system itself operates.”

VA medical centers provide a wide range of services, including traditional hospital-based services such as surgery, critical care, mental health, orthopedics, pharmacy, radiology and physical therapy.

“I think it’s important for anyone in a health care career to understand how different each type of hospital functions,” Pizarro said. “One methodology may work wonderfully at one institute, but that doesn’t mean it will work at another—and there are usually important reasons for that. That experience broadened my viewpoint of health care.”

Pizarro reflects fondly on her days as a Bull. She was an MHA student when the program earned its first accreditation from the Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Management Education. The process and ultimate reward was exciting to witness firsthand.

“I am very proud of this accomplishment for the COPH, and it is a highlight of my time in the college,” Pizarro said. “Since I was a student during that time, our work was submitted to the accrediting party. There was a lot of communication with the students during the process and we were kept updated on progress which made us feel very involved and connected with the process.”

The MHA program just recently earned reaccreditation for the next seven years.

Pizarro was also a member of the Healthcare Management Student Association (HMSA), which provides its members with real-world skills to create competent health administration professionals.

In addition, Pizarro was able to travel to Chicago and attend the American College of Health Care Executives Annual Congress (ACHE) as a student member.

“Being a part of HMSA and ‘student’ ACHE was so helpful in making connections and hearing from others in the field,” Pizarro said. “Even if I wasn’t ready to network in the formal sense, just hearing from various workers out in the community was great.”

After graduating with her MHA in health policy and management in 2011, Pizarro went on to be ACHE’s Post-Graduate Fellow in Chicago.

“That introduced me to the medical association world and my career was officially started,” she said.

Pizarro started work as a consultant at PerfectServe, a clinical communication company in Chicago.

“I had multiple roles there from meeting directly with physicians across the country, being a team lead and managing the intake of new contracts and assigning teams to their various implementations,” she said.

Then, Pizarro moved on to be a project manager at Northwestern Medicine in Chicago. Northwestern Medicine is the collaboration between Northwestern Memorial HealthCare and Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine that encompasses the research, teaching and patient care activities of the academic medical center.

“My largest project was assisting in the roll out of EPIC to our various hospitals—specifically the specialties preferences,” Pizarro said.

“EPIC is an electronic health record system that is user friendly and has a high level of customization,” Pizarro said. “My job was to get the leaders of each specialty across the system together, along with the EPIC analysts, to decide how they wanted EPIC to work for them. For example, all the orthopedic surgeons met multiple times to determine how their screens would look, what prompts they wanted, etc. Given that everyone has their own workflow, it was a great lesson in gaining consensus.”

Today, Pizarro is director of executive projects and operations at the American Academy of Dermatology, located in Rosemont, Ill.

“This is my second role in the company. I started as a senior manager within practice management, with a focus on health IT,” she said. “I then moved into my current role as director, working directly with our CEO on operations. I am essentially chief of staff. I work directly with the CEO and my focus is on the organization’s operation plan and ensuring initiatives are moving forward. I report to the board of directors on our progress.”

This role is one that Pizarro says did not previously exist and it required someone who was detail-oriented and had experience working with various teams to accomplish tasks and manage large projects.

“I oversee the program we use to monitor initiatives and progress throughout the year. I report out on the organization’s progress throughout the year to our various leadership teams and then prepare our executive director to report to the board on a quarterly basis,” she said. “When changes are needed to the plan, I bring that to the executive team to discuss. This role allows me to work with every department and multiple levels of staff.”

In 2023, Pizarro earned her certificate in nonprofit management from the Executive Education program at Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University. This tool will support her continuing journey in impacting public health.

“Public health affects everyone,” Pizarro said. “Any role you have within public health makes a difference. I think it’s important to remember your personal connection to the mission you are working toward to stay driven, innovate and make some positive changes.”

As for the future, Pizarro said she’d love to stay in operations. “I’m hesitant to speak too much of the future as opportunities have a funny way of coming about that you would never have expected,” she noted. “My career path has not been a straight line and I think there is something really gratifying in that.”

Fast Five:

What did you dream of becoming when you were young?

A teacher or college professor

Where would we find you on the weekend?

On the couch, reading a book

What is the last book you read?

“The Inmate,” by Freida McFadden

What superpower would you like to have?

Time travel

What’s your all-time favorite movie?

“Dirty Dancing”

Story by Liz Bannon, USF College of Public Health

The post MHA + health operations = an unexpected career path appeared first on College of Public Health News.

The USF College of Public Health’s (COPH) master of health administration (MHA) program held its inaugural MHA Pinning Ceremony and Reception to honor and celebrate the commitment of its students on Sept. 22. Sponsored by Tampa General Hospital and MHA Advisory Board members, the ceremony, brought together faculty, staff, alumni and health care industry leaders to recognize the dedication and promise of these future health care professionals.

The ceremony commenced with an address from Dr. Donna Petersen, COPH dean and senior associate vice president of USF Health, emphasizing the importance of preparing professionals not only with the right knowledge and skills, but also the right attitudes and character.

“Accepting this pin is a promise. We’re going to do everything in our power to prepare you to be highly effective, ethical and successful professionals,” Petersen said, “And in return, you promise us that you will honor what you learn here as you go forward and remain a part of our community.”

Next, Dr. Victor Weeden, assistant professor and director of the MHA program, spoke of the vision behind the pinning ceremony.

 “The MHA faculty wanted to do something special for the students to acknowledge an important milestone in their career,” he said. “We believe these future leaders should be publicly recognized for committing themselves to the health care profession and being competitively selected for MHA admission. We hope the ceremony will foster a heightened sense of pride and belonging for this special group of students.”

Alumni representatives played a crucial role in the ceremony, presenting the pins to second-year students. Their involvement highlighted the strong alumni engagement in the MHA program and its continued growth. First-year students were then given their pins from the newly pinned second-year students, a tradition that the program hopes to continue.

After the pinning of the students, two MHA alumni and advisory board members Seena Salyani and Steven Chew gave their remarks.

Salyani, CEO of Gastro Florida, praised the students for their commitment to a health care career and emphasized the importance of professionalism.

“Take pride in what you are doing as you enter a challenging field. It will have its ups and downs, but you will have an impact on people’s lives and making life better. Even after going through COVID-19 here, you are coming back even stronger,” Salyani said.

Sharing valuable insights about the health care field’s challenges and the need for creative problem-solving, Chew, vice president of service lines at Tampa General Hospital, urged the students to see the applicability of their knowledge and embrace the spirit of innovation.

“There are headwinds within health care that are real. You have payers wanting to pay less, patient experience, consumers and the rising cost of health care—and all of those problems need to be solved by thinking outside the box,” Chew said. “You’re going to have to apply and see what makes a difference.”

In closing, Dr. Mark Moseley, president of USF Tampa General Physician, emphasized the need for a collective effort to fix a broken health care system. He encouraged the students to consider their careers as contributing to an infinite game of improving health care, where fulfillment comes from a sense of purpose and giving back to society.

“What we need is a coalition of the willing who are committed to the infinite game of improving health care. We don’t declare a winner and a loser in health care, but you can join us in this just cause,” Moseley said. “Through your hard work and effort, you can contribute to the welfare and benefit of others. It will be all-consuming. It will be joyful. It will be challenging. But at the end of the day, when you’re done with your career, you will look back and you will be fulfilled. And if you’re lucky, you’ll get a chance to bring others along with you.”

View all photos of the ceremony here.

Story by Caitlin Keough, USF College of Public Health

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It was her love of languages that lead Kelly Carpenter to a career in global health. “I have a degree in Spanish language and literature,” said the Santa Barbara, Calif., native who graduated the USF College of Public Health (COPH) in 2015 with an MPH in global health practice.

“People who study language know that it starts with simple vocabulary and then expands into culture, history, art, literature, politics, etc. Through my Spanish studies, I found myself in different corners of the world. On a trip to Peru, I took a backpack filled with little notebooks and jotted down observations. I didn’t know it at the time, but everything I was observing and reflecting on and engaging in touched on public health. For instance, I spoke with a man who, decades prior, had been bitten by a highly venomous snake; his nearest health post was a two-hour canoe ride downriver. He sought care from the shaman in his community [a person thought to have special healing powers]. One could argue that he might’ve sought the shaman’s care regardless, but certainly this experience solidified his faith in the curative powers of the healer and shaped his healthcare decisions for life.”

Back in the States, Carpenter decided to investigate public health graduate programs.

“Retrospectively, it was more of an academic pursuit—to learn more about the communities of the world—than an intentional career choice,” said Carpenter, who ideally wanted to get a dual master’s degree in public health and anthropology. She said she settled on the COPH because the global health concentration was less clinical in nature than other programs. “The COPH program had the breadth I was looking for,” Carpenter said.

Carpenter was unable to pursue the dual master’s in anthropology and instead focused solely on public health. And today, she’s glad she did.

“Grad school is hard! I had my heart set on doing a dual masters, but I wasn’t accepted [to the anthropology program]. That was a blow, but in the end, it was appropriate,” she said. “I was working multiple jobs, including working in hospitality and taking jobs as an office manager and research assistant. I was also commuting and taking out student loans. A dual master’s was too much. I ended up selecting a certificate option in global health and Latin American and Caribbean Studies, and that was perfect. Where everything about global health was new to me, Latin American and Caribbean Studies felt like home, and it was a perfect complement to my MPH and where I would take it.”

After graduation, Carpenter took jobs in Nicaragua and Guatemala, working in program development and management.

“I worked in asset-based community development with health centers, microfinance organizations, family cooperatives and local NGOs as well as with rural and semi-urban schools and communities in environmental education and youth leadership development,” Carpenter explained.

Beginning her public health career in Nicaragua immediately after graduation was a pivotal move, both personally and professionally. 

In 2018, Nicaragua entered an extended socio-political crisis. There were protests and upheaval related to social security reform measures and political corruption.

“I, along with two teammates, were tasked with the close out of our program and operations,” Carpenter said. “It was extremely difficult and disappointing, and we learned a lot. Much of what I learned helped me navigate the unprecedented nature of work and running programs in March 2020 and will hopefully help the next time an inevitable transition comes around.”

Today, Carpenter is senior program manager for country operations at Seed Global Health in Boston. The health nonprofit forms local partnerships to strengthen clinical care delivery, improve health workforce education and support policies that enable health professionals to succeed.

“I work specifically with Malawi and Zambia,” Carpenter noted. “In both countries, Seed has partnered to grow the first family medicine specialist training program. Family physicians and primary care are crucial to strengthening healthcare systems and meeting the needs of dispersed and rural populations, such as those in Malawi and Zambia.”

Carpenter says she is also grateful to have been part of the team supporting partners in Malawi who started the country’s first health ward led by midwives.

“This project provides midwives with an environment where they can practice to the full scope of their training and abilities, helping improve clinical outcomes and preserve the hospital system for those who need it more acutely,” she said.

Carpenter said that what she loves most about working at Seed, and in public health in general, is the breadth of the work and her ability to partner with diverse teams across cultures.

“I love the path I’m on,” she said. “I’m still in a place of learning and growing every day, and I’m excited to see our Seed partnerships continue to blossom. As long as I’m learning, I’m succeeding, and I’m open to where that takes me.”

Alumni Fast Five

What did you dream of becoming when you were young?`

Everything, but photojournalism still haunts.

Where would we find you on the weekend?

Boston is an extremely walkable city—my boyfriend and I love to just leave the house walking and find ourselves in different parts of the city!

What is the last book you read?

“Think Like a Monk,” by Jay Shetty

What superpower would you like to have?

Telepathy. “I wish I could just show you what’s in my brain” is a phrase I utter weekly.

What’s your all-time favorite movie?

“Crash,” and about 15 other season-specific movies that I rewatch every year.

Story by Donna Campisano, USF College of Public Health

The post From Peru to Malawi (and places between), alumna builds career in global health appeared first on College of Public Health News.