Community Health Sciences Student Guidelines to Writing Logs

Sample Log for Week 1

Tu-Uyen Nguyen
Orange County Health Care Agency
Health Promotion Department
Log For Week Ending 7/3/97
Total Hours: 35.5
Cumulative Hours: 35.5

WEEK 1 LOG

      Last week, I started my internship with the Health Promotion Department of the Orange County Health Care Agency in Santa Ana. The first day of work started off with a lot of paperwork that I had to fill out in order to begin employment. Afterwards, my preceptor, Amy Dale, was very helpful in getting me oriented and settled. We discussed various details of my employment including my work schedule, parking, duties, agency policies/procedures, and scope of work. Amy also took the time to orient me around the department, show me my office, and introduce me to the office personnel. Everyone was very cordial and made me feel welcomed. After lunch, I met with Amy again to discuss about the Vietnamese community health promotion project I would be working on. She was very thorough in going over the written guidelines for field studies preceptor, making sure that she discussed each guideline with me. This process helped us both to begin structuring the field experience, and it gave me a good overview of my preceptor's role in my internship as well as my own responsiblities as an intern.

      The first day at work thus went very smoothly. The second day on the job was similarly swift, as I continued settling into my office and organizing my work schedule. Midway into the week, Amy suggested that I attend a Tobacco Use Prevention Program (TUPP) meeting to experience a coordination meeting with professionals, agencies, and community representatives. I was very impressed with this meeting because it showed me how effective a coalition can be if people from different agencies are willing to work together and pool their resources. Topics discussed at the meeting ranged from various youth activities updates (including "World No-Tobacco Day") to legislative updates and policy activities. Vicki Walker, the chair of TUPP, ran the meeting with great organization and ease and showed me an example of good facilitation skills. The meeting also gave me the opportunity to network with many individuals (and their representative organizations) involved in tobacco use prevention and health promotion.

      In addition to the TUPP meeting, I attended another meeting which gave me a greater awareness of the relationships between the Orange County Health Care Agency and other agencies. At this meeting, I learned about the cooperation of the Health Care Agency with CalOptima in the Child Health and Disability Prevention (CHDP) program. This meeting, unlike the much bigger TUPP meeting, involved only two people: one representative from the Maternal, Child and Adolescent Health Unit of the Health Care Agency (Nancy Clifton) and one representative from CalOptima (Carol Matthews). The purpose of the meeting was to discuss what is the most effective way of distributing CHDP materials, since the program had recently been transferred from the County to a carve-out of CalOptima. I learned from this meeting that effective decisions do not have to involve big groups of many individuals. Sometimes, two people are enough to make inter-agency decisions and produce results (even at the County level!).

      Overall, my first week of the internship started out very well. My preceptor has done an excellent job so far in guiding me in my work and has been very helpful with any questions that I have had. I think that I will learn a lot from this internship, and I am excited about the opportunities which lie ahead.

 

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