Funded Projects

Goals and Objectives:

The University of New Mexico Public Health Program (UNM-PHP), along with its public health academic and practice partners, is well poised to initiate the New Mexico MCH Public Health Training Institute (MCH-TI). There is both a great need for the MCH-TI and the capacity to be successful with it. New Mexico is one of the four poorest states in the nation and often is at the bottom in terms of maternal child health indicators. The MCH-TI will include an initial assessment of the needs of the New Mexico MCH workforce, the provision of a certificate program that is tailored to the needs of the trainees, an ongoing evaluation of the trainings and the completion of collaborative projects with other MCH agencies and professionals by the trainees. The MCH-TI will provide several kinds of trainings for rural and isolated MCH professionals that will result in a MCH Public Health graduate certificate. The trainings will include four in-person workshops for each of the four core courses and an individualized curriculum with content-specific modules, delivered through distance learning modalities, such as online courses, telehealth offerings, and webinars. The capstone experience of the certificate will include a written capstone paper based on an emerging MCH issue in New Mexico, as well as developing and presenting at a session at the New Mexico Public Health Association (NMPHA) annual conference. An interactive website will be developed to provide information on currently available trainings, resources for MCH public health information, and areas for sharing new ideas and lessons learned. The primary training partners in the MCH-TI will include the UNM PHP, New Mexico State University Department of Public Health Sciences (NMSU), UNM Center for Rural and Behavioral Health in the Department of Psychiatry (CRCBH), and Envision New Mexico (Envision) in the UNM Department of Pediatrics. Each of these primary collaborators will bring unique strengths and talents to the institute. The UNM PHP offers a Master of Public Health (MPH) degree with three concentrations in Community Health, Epidemiology, and Health Systems, Services and Policy. The program actively recruits culturally diverse students from rural and isolated communities in the state. NMSU offers an MPH in Community Health Education, on campus as well as online. Its student body is also very diverse and the online MPH degree serves many students living in rural and isolated areas. Both the CRCBH and Envision have many years of experience in providing telehealth trainings on a wide variety of topics that have reached many rural and isolated providers and MCH professionals.