Category: Summer 2023

The Fight for Healthcare Access for All: Disrupting Language Barriers

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Hello! My name is Emily, and I am an incoming second-year MPH student at UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health in the global health concentration. This summer, I am doing my practicum with a non-profit organization in Carrboro, NC called Refugee Community Partnership (RCP). RCP works with local refugee and migrant communities to connect people to the resources and social connections they need and eliminate barriers to access to these resources. I have learned a lot so far and am very excited to see what this summer will hold! There is one main idea that has been prominent in my mind since beginning my practicum: The power of community.

Emily Benson

The Power of Community

The main idea that is present in every task, project, and program in this organization is community. RCP does a phenomenal job working directly with the community and ensuring that they are working to address the community’s goals. They achieve this in many ways, but one of the most prominent ways is through one of their main community-led programs called Language Navigators. Through this program, RCP members are able to request a “language navigator” to go with them to medical appointments. These language navigators are community members who go with an RCP member to help navigate the medical appointment environment from the parking lot to check-in. During the appointment with the provider, medical offices that receive federal funding (such as hospitals and clinics that receive Medicare or Medicaid payments) are federally required to provide a medical interpreter. However, often, they do not. The language navigator is there to help the patient advocate for a medical interpreter and ensure the patient understands all of the doctor’s instructions. At the end of the appointment, the language navigator is there to help with coordinating lab work, scheduling follow-up appointments, and coordinating referrals.

RCP’s direct partnership with the community in this program is beyond inspiring to me. I have learned a lot about the importance of community partnership just by watching this program take place. Their language navigator program is truly making a huge change, one medical appointment and one person at a time!

The Community-Led Research Project

During my practicum, I have been mainly working with the RCP research team on a community-led research project. The main goal of the research project is to determine the full scale of language inaccess in medical settings and the main barriers to access to healthcare among refugee and immigrant communities. The primary focus is on how language inaccess among these communities affects their ability to access quality health care.

This research project primarily aims to assess language access for six languages: Arabic, Karen, Burmese, Pashto, Dari, and Spanish. Our team is working to collect and analyze both quantitative and qualitative data to determine the availability, quality, and type of interpretation provided at medical appointments through surveys, community forums, and in-depth interviews.

Egg rolls that one of the RCP members made

Several weeks ago, the research team held a community forum for women in the Arabic-speaking community to discuss access to healthcare and language inaccess among this community. The other MPH intern and I created visual images of the main themes from this forum for the team to bring back to the women in the Arabic-speaking community to ensure that the themes the research team observed are the main problems and concerns they are actually facing. (Again, RCP does such an amazing job partnering with the community!) Along with this,  I have also been helping with the coding and analysis of the qualitative data for the research project. It has been extremely exciting and fulfilling to be able to put some of the things I’ve learned in my MPH classes into practice these past two weeks, and I am excited to continue working on this research project for the rest of the summer!

Working with RCP on this research project has been a very eye-opening experience for me. It has allowed me to see the depth and impacts of language inaccess among refugee and migrant communities in healthcare settings. While I have only been working with RCP for about two weeks, I feel as if I have experienced a whole new world within the community of Chapel Hill.

I’m extremely thankful to be able to intern at such an amazing organization with incredible people! I’m very excited to see how I will grow this summer and further discover the power of communities in creating change in the medical system. I cannot wait to see what the rest of my time at RCP will hold!

– Emily

Gaining Hands-On Emergency Management Experience at the UNC Office of Emergency Management and Planning

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Hello! My name is John Shusko, and I am an MPH candidate in the Gillings School of Global Public Health, pursuing a Global Health concentration. Some of my interests include emergency management, infectious diseases, and leveraging policy to manage public health crises. This summer, I am completing my practicum at the UNC Office of Emergency Management and Planning (EMP) as a summer intern. As such, I will be participating in a variety of projects, and will be working with seasoned emergency management professionals to help expand my knowledge and familiarity with this field.

Over the first two weeks of my practicum, I have gained the opportunity to meet with each of the four emergency managers that work in the EMP office. Through individual meetings and conversations with each of these managers, I have learned about their respective roles in the organization. I have also been able to see how all these managers work together as well as with other external University organizations (such as Campus Safety and Communications) to create both effective emergency plans and respond to campus emergencies. Their use of technology has been particularly fascinating to me and learning more about technologies in place such as Alert Carolina and internal management tools have allowed me to see how each of the respective “pieces” of emergency management must fall together and coordinate effectively to ensure a robust and efficient unified University response to emergencies.

Emergency management is related to public health in the sense that the EMP office helps to address different emergencies and challenges before they arise. The office also helps keep the University community safe during high-profile events such as UNC-Duke basketball games and visiting Presidents and Vice Presidents (such as former Vice President Pence’s visit a few weeks ago). Keeping our campus community safe and working with the vast University resources is a form of public health at the local level, as it allows our University community to continue their studies as free from hazards and emergencies as possible.

I will be presenting two deliverables by the end of the internship. First, I will be creating a framework for the UNC EMP office to create an end-of-year report detailing the high-profile emergencies and safety incidents on campus that occurred throughout the academic year. This information can then be presented to the Chancellor’s office. Second, I will be creating a survey to distribute to other UNC system and ACC schools’ emergency management offices to discuss their process for conducting a threat/hazard identification and risk assessment for their respective campus communities. Using this, if time allows, I will help create an outline for such a plan using lessons learned from the UNC system and ACC schools I receive feedback from.

I am excited for the opportunity to explore a new field for me and gaining hands-on experience with professionals in the field. I am excited for the rest of the practicum and look forward to sharing another update later in the summer!

– John

Targeting TB Care Through Civil Surgeon Continuing Education

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Hello! My name is Audrey and I am completing my practicum with the NC Department of Health and Human Services, specifically with the NC Tuberculosis (TB) Program.

Project Details: My practicum focuses on the completing the 4-phase project, “Civil Surgeon Educational Survey and Evaluation on Latent TB Infection (LTBI) diagnosis and treatment.” This project focuses on strengthening the partnership with the community to combat active tuberculosis by increasing treatment initiation and completion of latent tuberculosis infection for those at higher risk of LTBI.

One of the groups that is at higher risk for LTBI is immigrants from countries where tuberculosis is endemic. For example, some countries with a high TB burden include Vietnam, Mexico, and Ukraine. Whenever someone is pursuing a change in permanent resident status in the United States, they must be evaluated by a civil surgeon. Therefore, civil surgeons are in a unique position to address tuberculosis care since immigrants and refugees seeking a change in immigration status must complete a medical examination by a civil surgeon, which includes evaluation for tuberculosis. Civil surgeons are valuable partners in identifying individuals with latent tuberculosis and can be the first line of education surrounding treatment and referral to the health department, if necessary.

My practicum project builds off work completed by former students that assessed NC civil surgeon knowledge of tuberculosis care. The last phase of the project (which I will be completing) is the creation of a webinar that provides civil surgeons with the most updated information on TB and LTBI care.

Selection Process: This practicum role was posted in the Practicum Opportunities Newsletter, which is an email sent to MPH students that includes new opportunities that have been vetted by Gillings. I was looking for a role in the infectious disease space, and one that provided me with a new experience to practice my communication skills. I am a dual-degree pharmacy and public health student, and in my future career I want to feel confident when talking to multiple different people about health topics, including patients and providers. This experience provides me with an opportunity to directly talk to providers about infectious disease prevention!

This experience has already allowed me to work and grow independently as I plan the educational materials for this project. We are planning to hold 3 live webinars to present this information to civil surgeons around the state.

Thanks for reading!

-Audrey