As a part of the requirements for the Master of Public Health (MPH) program at the University of Nevada, Reno (UNR), I was required to complete a full-time internship outside of my (then) current organization. To make a long story short, although this required taking a huge leap of faith and leaving my position as a health educator and as the designated accreditation coordinator (among many other things), it turned out to be a truly phenomenal experience.
I was able to leave my comfort zone of suburban Nevada (technically, Carson City is “urban”, but so small that it feels as rural as many other Nevada towns) to work with staff at the Elko site of the Office of Rural Health, housed within the UNR School of Medicine. Here, I was able to meet and work with elected officials and representative from other organizations to develop a set of educational tools for the members of the newly-formed Elko County Health Board, the local board of health (LBOH).
A little background: according to the Association for State and Territorial Health Officials’ (ASTHO) 2016 report, Nevada has a “largely decentralized” public health system. What this means is that there are LHDs that provide public health services to the population centers (over 75% of the population), while the state-level health authority, the Nevada Division of Public and Behavioral Health (DPBH) oversees public health services to the rural and frontier counties. To ensure that these counties have their needs met, Nevada Revised Statutes (NRS 439) dictates that each county is to have a LBOH to coordinate local and state activities. Unfortunately, until recent years, this has not been the case for most of the rural and frontier counties, who have been without formalized LBOHs. However, over the last few years, several of the rural and frontier counties have been rallying to address this disparity, including Elko County. The Elko County Health Board (ECHB) was formed at the end of 2015, and have been meeting quarterly since that time.
However, without any history as to what their role should be, it was difficult for the ECHB to find it’s footing; what must it regulate? How should this be done? What do LBOHs do in regions where they do not oversee LHDs? There were no applicable training tools at hand for LBOHs that stand alone without overseeing some sort of public health organization, such as an LHD.
So, here’s where my internship project came in. I had the opportunity to develop a set of tools that could be parked in a public place and could easily be accessed by new ECHB members, staff who work with the ECHB, or by any other interested party.
The videos below were the preliminary content videos that I created for the board. Official (and quite frankly, higher quality) versions of the “Essentials in Action” content is available from the Western Region Public Health Training Center, and can be accessed for free here. I am currently working on re-vamping the toolkit and likely breaking it down into smaller, more manageable chunks. I have not included the draft written content to this post, since I’m planning to deliver that content in another way in the final version of the toolkit.
If you have any questions, please feel free to comment on this blog, email me (ruralhealthroundup@gmail.com) or to comment directly on the YouTube videos themselves. Thanks for watching!
Module 1 – “Public Health 101: Essentials in Action”
Module 2 – “What is a Local Board of Health?”
Module 3 – “Local Boards of Health in Nevada”
Rural Health Roundup 