MPH Practicum

Heluna Health is a national nonprofit leader in providing program and support services to optimize population health for more than 500 health projects. The agency offers a full range of program development, personnel, financial and grant management solutions to researchers, universities, consortia, government agencies, community organizations and population health practitioners so they can focus on what they do best – helping more people live healthy and productive lives. Heluna Health is also an innovator of direct service programs, including the largest nonprofit network of WIC centers in the nation. Visit www.helunahealth.org to learn more about how you can make an impact by joining our team.

The overall goal for this practicum project is to explore and evaluate measures of community access to social safety net services and measures of community vulnerability to public health emergencies. This practicum is part of a larger project to evaluate factors that influence outbreak preparedness in the United States. This type of emergency preparedness research has gained prominence in recent years with the COVID-19 pandemic, but is applicable to a variety of communicable disease and other disaster preparedness efforts.

Through this practicum, the student will identify and evaluate potential measures of access to social safety net services and community vulnerability. This will include:

• Creating variables to represent these measures by analyzing data from the US Census, HRSA, USDA, HUD, and other sources.
• Preliminary testing of measures of access to social safety net services and community vulnerability as predictors of key preparedness indicators.
• Preparing graphical and mapping products to visualize the data.
• Writing a summary that describes the methods and findings, and their relevance to the social determinants of health.
• Writing a data brief that presents the findings to a public audience in plain language.

Brief project/program description and population served: Communities in the U.S., with a focus on communities most vulnerable to the impacts of communicable disease outbreaks

Student responsibilities and activities: The student will be responsible for conducting data management and analyzing data from several data sources (secondary data analysis), creating graphs and other data visualizations, writing a summary of the analysis and findings, and digesting the findings to a data brief.

Skills and other requirements:

• Ability to use SAS for data management, statistical analysis, and data visualization.
• Ability to write reports for scientific audiences as well as plain language documents describing scientific findings.
• Possess curiosity and tenacity to explore data and ask questions.
• Ability to work collaboratively as well as conduct independent work.
• Attention to detail and timely follow-through.
• Ability to conduct spatial analysis in ArcGIS preferred but not required.

Final product(s)/deliverables:

(1) Final clean data set with documentation of variables, including metrics created to describe community vulnerability and access to social safety net services,

(2) Written summary of statistical analysis and findings, including graphs and maps,

(3) Presentation of the practicum work to management and staff, and

(4) Data brief describing key results of the analysis to a public audience.

Education/Experience

Must be enrolled in a Masters of Public Health program in an accredited school.

PHYSICAL DEMANDS

• Stand = Occasionally
• Walk = Occasionally
• Sit = Constantly
• Handling / Fingering = Constantly
• Reach Outward = Occasionally
• Reach Above Shoulder = Occasionally
• Climb, Crawl, Kneel, Bend = Occasionally
• Lift / Carry = Occasionally - Up to 25 lbs
• Push/Pull = Occasionally - Up to 25 lbs
• See = Constantly
• Taste/ Smell = Not Applicable
• Not Applicable: Not required for essential functions
• Occasionally: (0 - 2 hrs/day)
• Frequently: (2 - 5 hrs/day)
• Constantly: (5 hrs/day)

WORK ENVIRONMENT

Remote or Hybrid

Heluna Health is an Affirmative Action, Equal Opportunity Employer that encourages minorities, women, veterans, and disabled to apply.