Department: Breastfeeding Program/ Bureau of Family Health (Louisiana Dept. of Health – Office of Public Health)
Position: Practicum Position (Unpaid)
Time Period: Summer/Fall 2016 (through Spring 2017, if desired)
Background: The Louisiana Office of Public Health, Bureau of Family Health (BFH) is the recipient of the Title V Maternal and Child Block Grant funds and the Title X Family Planning Grant funds for the State of Louisiana. With these funds, the Bureau manages family planning services, pregnancy prevention, mortality surveillance (Fetal, infant, child, and maternal), pregnancy and maternal child health educational initiatives, as well as domestic violence prevention.
The BFH provides qualified public health students with a rewarding practicum/internship. Students will gain valuable public health experience, specific to maternal and child health/breastfeeding. Students will provide programmatic support to a statewide breastfeeding initiative targeting LA maternity care facilities (The Gift) with a focus on evaluation and data collection/analysis.
The purpose of the Bureau of Family Health Gift Program internship is to foster skilled public health professionals and advocates for maternal and child public health issues, specifically breastfeeding. Students will learn how social, behavioral, environmental and biological factors contribute to breastfeeding outcomes and specific strategies to address policy, community, organizational barriers to breastfeeding. The Practicum Student/Intern will be embedded within the Data Action team and his/her primary purpose will be to work with The Gift Program Manager and Data to Action Team Leader on the evaluation of The Gift program.
Detailed description of the internship
Purpose(s): Primary Purpose: To measure The Gift program’s impact on breastfeeding initiation, exclusivity and duration among women delivering in Gift designated hospitals. Secondary Purpose: To evaluate the success of The Gift model in aiding participating hospitals in improvement in the Ten Steps to achieving The Gift and/or the Baby-Friendly Hospital designation.
Goals
- Gain experience in program evaluation in the “real world.”
- Practice database design skills.
- Analyze, summarize and present data.
- Develop skills related to public health project management, implementation and evaluation.
Objectives
- Explore literature on the evaluation of the breastfeeding initiatives targeting delivery hospitals and health care providers.
- Describe design considerations for controlling for confounding factors in real world evaluation of programs which exist in communities with multiple efforts aimed at influencing breastfeeding practices.
- Apply statistical methods to self-assessment data and pre and post training data
- Transcribe qualitative interview data from hospital staff.
- Summarize, write up and present aggregate and hospital specific results to The Gift
- Apply theory and strategy based communication principles across different settings and audiences.
- Demonstrate effective written and oral skills for communication in the process of design, implementation and evaluation of public health programs.
- Develop/improve a contacts/outreach management system for the program.
Main Responsibilities/Activities
Data and Analytic Tasks
The Gift-collected application, assessment, training and interview data and Louisiana PRAMS (2011) data, will be used for all analyses. Monitoring hospital improvements in the Ten Step process will include data entry, management and analysis of application, assessment and survey data. Analyses will include calculation of totals and percentages. The internship is within the Data Action Team and the Community, Innovation and Action (CIA) Team. A large part of the assignment is the preparation and communication of the findings/results and project management. The intern will be expected to prepare the results in easy to understand format and summarize what the data are “telling” us in terms of what “action” The Gift staff and participating hospitals can take to further refine their efforts.
Administrative Function & Other
- Monitor and respond to emails
- Attend meetings, conference calls, etc. related to The Gift
- Record minutes at meetings
- Other tasks as assigned
- Participate in other OPH/Bureau of Family Health related meetings as indicated
- Coordinate, as needed, with other practicum students working on breastfeeding programs and initiatives
- Prepare reports
- Data entry
Required Skills/Qualities
- Organized
- Professional
- Highly independent worker and motivated
- Critical thinker
- Foundation or interest in data management and manipulation
- Strong aptitude for written and oral communications
- Familiarity with SAS and combining datasets in SAS
- High level of competence with PPT, Excel
- Microsoft Access skills for database and query design as well as creation of data entry forms for data input preferred
- No specific analytic competencies are required, as they will be learned as part of the internship experience
Primary Supervisors
Jane Herwehe, MPH, Epidemiology Supervisor
Jane Herwehe, MPH has 24 years of public health experience. She received her Master of Public Health degree from Tulane University School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine in 1989 and has worked nationally and internationally, in program design and evaluation with an emphasis on health care access and utilization, infectious diseases, behavioral health, and public health informatics. She recently joined the staff at the Bureau of Family Health and is spearheading evaluation of select Bureau programs. In her previous position with the Louisiana State University Health System, she supervised and mentored six graduate student interns from LSU School of Public Health, Tulane University and George Washington University. With the BFH, she supervises the Data and Action Team comprised of 4 epidemiologists and 4 survey and interview coordinators for the Pregnancy Risk and Monitoring System (PRAMS). Jane designed the evaluation for The Gift Program, the Bureau’s breastfeeding initiative.
Marci Brewer, MPH, Breastfeeding Program Manager
Marci.Brewer@LA.GOV
Marci Brewer received her Master of Public Health (MPH), with a focus in Maternal and Child Health, from Tulane University School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine in August 2008. Prior to moving to New Orleans to pursue her Master in Public Health (MPH) in 2006, she worked in Western Samoa in their Ministry of Health and with the Women, Infants, and Children Program (WIC) in Fairfax County, Virginia where her passion for breastfeeding as a public health issue developed. She has a strong passion and interest in breastfeeding as a public health issue and made breastfeeding and maternal and child health the focus of her MPH related studies. As the Breastfeeding Program Manager for the Bureau of Family Health, she coordinates The Gift, a hospital-based breastfeeding initiative and designation program, and also oversees the Louisiana Breastfeeding Coalition.
For more information or to apply, please contact Marci Brewer at Marci.Brewer@la.gov.
