Field Placement: UCLA Center for the Study of Latino Health and Culture
Preceptor: Dr. Maria Hayes-Bautista
Student Name: Emily Hinton
Year: 2002

I completed my field studies at the UCLA Center for the Study of Latino Health and Culture (CESLAC) under the supervision of Dr. and Maria Hayes-Bautista. The focus of my field studies project was program evaluation. During my ten weeks at CESLAC, I worked on three different projects: MedPEP, CAUSE and ECOSLO.

MedPEP is a collaborative project between CESLAC and multiple Los Angeles-area community colleges whose goal is to forge a link between community colleges and UCLA. The purpose of the collaborative is to provide minority students at the community college-level with support and encouragement to pursue careers in the allied health services. The MedPEP course will expose minority community college students to selected topics in minority health, and will provide mentors, contacts at UCLA and UCLA course credit for transfer. In working on this project, I spent a great deal of time formulating course materials (working on a course reader), which involved evaluating the educational needs of the population who'd be taking the course. I participated in a focus group consisting of representatives from about six community colleges during which we evaluated the needs, assets and environment of the community colleges, and data collection methods.

CAUSE, or the Coastal Alliance United for a Sustainable Economy, is a small grassroots activist organization in Ventura County. The project's goal is to start organizing Ventura County to expand health insurance to its low-wage workers. To accomplish this goal, CAUSE is performing outreach activities to educate workers on health insurance options, forming a community advisory board to consider options for expanding insurance, and surveying small businesses to find out about their health insurance needs, knowledge and attitudes. We met with the Director of CAUSE often during my internship to discuss the project's goals and progress toward them, and also to collect qualitative data, and discuss quantitative data for the final evaluation. The majority of the deliverables produced during my internship consisted of technical support on this project. My preceptor and I helped to format an employer survey, we helped to structure the content of meetings with the community advisory board, and we worked extensively on constructing outreach materials. I performed a great deal of research on various county efforts in California to expand health insurance, on the differential burden of health insurance costs for large firms versus small firms, and on proposals to expand insurance at the state level. I then synthesized my findings into easy-to-read visuals for CAUSE to share with the advisory board. ECOSLO is the Environmental Center of San Luis Obispo.

ECOSLO contracted CESLAC to help them complete a descriptive health survey of two area communities where they suspect that people's health may be compromised by pesticide use on nearby agricultural fields. We met with the Director of ECOSLO often, where we discussed sampling methods as well as methods for administering a door-to-door questionnaire. We discussed using already existing census and CHIS data rather than performing door-to-door interviews. My preceptor and I spent two days driving through the communities of interest to get a "feel" for their character, occasionally stopping to talk to residents. We provided technical support in the form of research on the effects of pesticides, to determine which particular diseases are linked to chemical exposure. Additionally, we helped to construct the interview tool that will be used if door-to-door interviews are performed.

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