Field Placement: Los Angeles County Department of Health Services -- Maternal, Child, and Adolescent Health
Preceptor: Kevin Donovan
Student Name: Phinney Ahn
Year: 2002

The goal of field studies is for students to gain firsthand knowledge of working in a health-related agency and apply theories of program planning, policy formulation, and evaluation in situations outside the classroom. After completing the first year of the Master Program at the UCLA School of Public Health in June of 2002, I began a 10 week summer internship at the Los Angeles County Department of Health Services (LAC DHS). My area of interest is child health policy and was subsequently assigned to Maternal, Child, and Adolescent Health (MCAH) Programs where I would be working with the Research, Evaluation, and Planning (REP) Unit. Working for the county appealed to me because I thought it would be a good opportunity to understand how government agencies plan programs that serve a large number of people. LAC DHS is responsible for promoting the health and well-being for almost 10 million people.

I was fortunate to be assigned to work on two projects. My preceptor, Kevin Donovan, MPH is a Research Analyst with the REP Unit and also a UCLA School of Public Health alumnus (epidemiology). He has been with the county for 3 years and conducts data analysis for the county's 8 perinatal and child health programs. This summer the REP Unit was selected as a Data Utilization Institute (DUI) Team for the annual CityMatCH conference in September, 2002. CityMatCH is a nonprofit organization at the University of Nebraska that focuses on maternal and child health issues. The Los Angeles County DUI Team must prepare a poster presentation and a Best Practices model that illustrates the evaluation platform used to monitor the performance of 8 perinatal and child health programs at LAC DHS. I worked on developing the evaluation platform for LAC MCAH, including the concept for the poster, writing up the Best Practices model, and finalizing the performance measures for each program.

I was also given the opportunity to participate in program planning and monitoring by working with the Los Angeles County Black Infant Health (BIH) Program Coordinator, Yolonda Rogers-Jones. She manages the 5 subcontract agencies that implement the Black Infant Health Program in Los Angeles. This involved attending team meetings with each agency and developing a monthly reporting system. I also participated in various other program-related duties such as creating forms, maintaining correspondence, and handling budgeting/invoicing issues.

I was fortunate to work with a highly motivated and hard working team. I acquired many valuable skills that contributed to my overall professional and personal growth. I learned the GIS/mapping software MapInfo, which is extremely useful in creating geographic representations of information. I also learned more about grant writing, program planning and budgeting, which is essential to subcontracted community-based organizations. Most importantly, I acquired skills to work more effectively with health professionals to collectively evaluate the impact of programs as a whole. The governmental setting provided a challenging backdrop to accomplishing tasks but subsequently, forced me to be more innovative in my problem solving. I enjoyed my overall field experience and feel it was valuable in teaching me crucial skills necessary to pursue a career of public health (in the public sector).

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