Field Placement: Los Angeles County Department of Health Services Maternal, Child, and Adolescent Health
Location: Los Angeles, CA
Preceptor: Wendy Schiffer, MSPH
Student Name: Rebecca Cook
Year: 2003

During the summer of 2003, I participated in the Los Angeles County Department of Health Services (DHS) Summer Administrative Internship Program. I interned with the Maternal, Child, and Adolescent Health (MCAH) division, and more specifically, with the Children’s Health Initiative (CHI) and Children’s Health Outreach Initiative (CHOI) units. I worked closely with CHI/CHOI staff as well as community-based agency staff. My internship focused on projects that sought to improve general health and access to health insurance coverage among people living in Los Angeles.

Throughout the twelve weeks I spent with DHS, I divided my time on a few different projects. The first couple of weeks I assisted in writing a grant proposal for Steps to a Healthier US, a program that seeks to reduce the burden of diabetes, overweight, obesity and asthma through addressing three related risk factors -- physical inactivity, poor nutrition and tobacco use. After the first couple of weeks at DHS, I began to work on Healthy Kids, a health coverage project focusing on outreach, enrollment, utilization and retention, targeting children ages zero to five. Healthy Kids contracting agencies include ten community-based organizations, Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) and Los Angeles County of Education (LACOE). DHS coordinates the Healthy Kids project and the launch date was during my second week in the office. My primary focus on this project was assisting in the development of the evaluation component. I worked closely with DHS staff analysts to finalize data collection forms as well as coordinate and train all contracting agency staff on the data collection forms and a newly designed data system used for tracking agency clients. I spent the last few weeks of my internship evaluating a past health coverage outreach and enrollment project. This involved compiling and analyzing data from two years of monthly reports as well as writing a summary analysis.

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