Graduate Student Internship Program

This internship has been filled.

Pennsylvania

Maternal Child Health Graduate Student Intern
Pennsylvania Department of Health, Bureau of Family Health, Harrisburg, PA
Skill Area: Data Analysis and Monitoring, Needs Assessment

Agency Information

The Pennsylvania Department of Health's (Department) mission is to promote healthy lifestyles, prevent injury and disease, and to assure the safe delivery of quality of health care for all Commonwealth citizens.

It has authority to enforce all statutes pertaining to public health for the prevention and suppression of disease and injury. The Department works closely with local health agencies in cities, counties, and municipalities. The Bureau of Family Health (BFH) is under the deputate of  Health Promotion and Disease Prevention which has responsibility for developing and implementing a wide variety of educational, preventative, and treatment programs but not limited to the areas of communicable diseases; family health, including infant nutrition programs; cancer; HIV/AIDS; and tobacco, drug, and alcohol abuse. The BFH is responsible for administration of Title V programs, is one of five Bureaus housed within this Office.

The Bureau through its Divisions of Child and Adult Health Services (CAHS), Community Systems Development and Outreach (CSDO), Newborn Screening and Genetics (NSG), and Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women Infants and Children (WIC) exercises its capacity to promote and protect the health of all mothers and children, including children with special health care needs (CSHCN), through a variety of services.

Purpose, goals, and objectives of internship

Pennsylvania’s Maternal Child Health Program is in the process of initiating a comprehensive statewide Title V Needs and Capacity Assessment. In conjunction with the 5-year needs and capacity assessment, smaller data analysis projects are scheduled in support of the needs and capacity assessment. Pennsylvania’s Graduate Student Internship proposal offers a student intern the opportunity to actively participate in this statewide project gathering and analyzing primary and secondary data elements.

A proposed project is to work with the state MCH epidemiologist to create a time series forecasting analysis of national and outcomes performance measures. The project will analyze the outcomes of 18 National Performance Measures, and 6 Outcome Measures. The student internship project will undertake concurrent Title V needs and capacity analysis for the purpose of measuring Pennsylvania’s progress towards achievement of each individual National Performance and Outcome Measure in relation to median national outcomes. The ability to better anticipate future outcomes by managing uncertainty through the use of effective forecasting modeling will greatly assist Program Managers in their decision-making process. The project will develop and apply quantitative or statistical methods to forecast future national and outcomes annual performances. The forecasting model will improve prediction of future performance indicator values by analyzing past indicator values and other variables used to predict performance. The forecasting model will be preserved for future use to be restored and updated during the annual Title V Block Grant application development process.

As a secondary project, the selected Graduate Intern will work with the Bureau of Family Health and Bureau of Health Statistics and Research to develop a new Child Death Review process. The purpose of the State Child Death Review Committee is to promote safety and reduce child fatalities. With the passage of Act 87 (SB684) on October 8, 2008, each of the 67 Pennsylvania counties in the Commonwealth will be required to establish a local public health child death review team. The Child Death Review Program is required to facilitate State and local multiagency, multidisciplinary teams to examine the circumstances surrounding deaths of children 21 years of age and under. The Intern will assist the statewide team in gathering and analyzing data that will form the basis for policy recommendations. The Intern will participate in the development of the annual report submission to the Governor and the General Assembly by September 2009. The annual report will contain the activities of the State child death review team, as well as, recommendations relating to the reduction of risk for child injury or death.

During the last week of the program, the Intern will be asked to provide a brief presentation to describe his/her role in research projects.  The Intern will also be asked to write a three-page brief outlining what the individual learned in the program, summarizing their research experience and describing what they liked most and least about the program.

Data or analytic tasks and activities

The project’s objective is to compare Pennsylvania’s annual performance outcomes to that of 50 States and 9 Jurisdiction’s aggregate outcome. Through comparative analysis, aggregate national outcomes will enable Pennsylvania’s MCH program to better evaluate its annual progress. The project’s ultimate achievement is to improve Bureau integration of the use of performance measures within the planning, budget, personnel, and other MCH management processes. The potential exists in future projects to identify appropriate benchmarking partners whose best practices have the most potential for applicability and success in improving the needs of women and children of Pennsylvania.

National aggregate data are typically used to report status from a national perspective to improve services for women and children and as a standard to compare results of grantee programs. The process of comparing data across grantee programs requires skill and judgment due to the extensive variation across state MCH programs. Pennsylvania recognizes that although individual state MCH programs operate within a national program framework of legislation, policy, and oversight that no two programs are alike. Programs vary in the amount of funding and other resources available, program infrastructure for management and service delivery, population demographics, and other unique characteristics of the jurisdiction such as cultural and geographical barriers to screening.

Forecasting is a prediction of what will occur in the future, and it is an uncertain process. Because of the uncertainty, the accuracy of a forecast is as important as the outcome predicted by the forecast. The analytic task of business forecasting techniques will be utilized by the selected Intern. For those reasons, Pennsylvania is requesting a Master’s level student with public health training to participate in the projects.

The Child Death Review Committee will review reports from local teams, identify prevention strategies and activities; adopt policies and recommendations to prevent child death based on collected data. The statewide committee will review Commonwealth wide birth, death, and injury prevention statistics to determine areas where enhanced awareness activities should be targeted.

Data or analytic skills required

The student should have a working knowledge of SPSS or SAS, as well as Excel, and have some experience in using descriptive analytical techniques.  Experience in using inferential statistics would be a plus.

Supervisors

During the internship period, the Intern will work directly with secondary supervisors Wayne Fleming, M.P.A., MCH Title V Coordinator and Ronald Tringali, PhD, MCH Epidemiologist.

Internship begins

June 1, 2009

Transportation

The work location is accessible via public transportation.

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