Kristie Wyatt, MPH
UNC Greensboro School of Health and Human Sciences
Program Planning
Public health professionals focus on preventing disease and injury by promoting healthy lifestyles by developing educational programs, policy proposal and advocacy, conducting research, and providing services.
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Reflection
I have planned dozens of health related programs over the years. I have worked on teams, supervised volunteers, and worked alone. I have managed a budget in the thousands, and had to create something out of nothing. I have planned fundraisers, workshops, classes, and fairs. I have created more flyers than I can count.
Although program planning used to be a part of my job I dreaded, I would now consider it to be one of my greatest strengths. I am frequently called on by colleagues to provide workshops or to advise them at various parts of their own program planning process. For example, when I transitioned from the Wellness Education Coordinator role to Assistant Director of the Accessibility Resource Center, my former department hired a Health Outreach Coordinator to take on the work I began. During the first several months of transition, I met with the new Coordinator to review program planning best practices and to prepare for upcoming evaluations. We poured over various evidence-informed curriculum packets to determine what adaptations would best fit our community. I was also able to use resources (such as Healthy People 2020 and the Community Tool Box) I learned about in the MPH program to enhance this mentorship role.
Evidence of Competence
Background
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In 2018, a colleague and I were asked by the Academic/Administrative Support Staff Association (A/ASSA) at Guilford College to create a program in response to concerns from its members about working with irate or intoxicated clients, or while working a solitary night shift.
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Methods
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I began by issuing a brief questionnaire to the group about issues of concern and then used the responses to guide me during a formal focus group.
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Using the results from the questionnaire and the focus group, I researched the topic thoroughly using resources I learned about in HEA 601: Principles of Community Health Education and HEA 609: Community Health Organizations. This research helped me to identify risk factors (such as gender, handling money, and shift work) and best practice educational tools such as (de-escalation, empowerment from self-defense knowledge, and identifying threats).
Results
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We provided the training at a time/location that the audience chose, covered topics from the research and questionnaire, and conducted a qualitative evaluation. Afterwards I debriefed with my co-presenter to create an outline of changes to be made for following sessions. During this process ​I identified a language barrier between myself and a large portion of the audience. I attempted to obtain translated transcripts of all of the presentation and materials, but was unable to locate this resource at our institution before the event. As a result, we were not able to engage with some of the audience members. In response to this setback, I worked with colleagues in our Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion offices to begin the process of identifying available translation services for faculty and staff which will now be available for future programming.
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The advertisements below are a showcase of several of my health education programs at Guilford College.