Over the past 15 years, the College of Public Health has developed outstanding partnerships with the local public health departments in Northeast Ohio and beyond. According to Sonia Alemagno, Ph.D., dean of the College of Public Health, the College and local public health departments share a mission to improve the health in our communities, making it both efficient and effective to share the talent of existing and emerging public health professionals. The college has formalized those partnerships into a cooperative system called Academic Health Departments.
The cooperative currently includes local health departments from: Թ City, Stark, Wayne, Portage, Medina, Lorain, Putnam, Columbiana, Summit, Trumbull County, Mahoning, Lake, Geauga, and Putnam counties. These health departments work with faculty and staff from the College of Public Health toward the shared goal of providing the best experiential education for future public health professionals.
“The health departments represent our foremost partners in training the public health workforce and implementing critical public health services,” says Alemagno.
Alemagno and a group of CPH faculty and staff meet quarterly with 12 academic health departments in Ohio to discuss student project development; areas of cooperative research and practice such as artificial intelligence; the use of public health practitioners in teaching the students public health concepts; and most importantly the differences in public health practice among the various local communities.
According to Kirk Norris, MPH, health commissioner of the Stark County Health Department, “public health is inherently local in nature, as every community has unique health disparities, resources, and cultural factors that shape its needs. Local health departments serve as an invaluable bridge between academic learning and real-world public health challenges.”
Students are not the only ones that benefit from the partnership. Local health departments (LHD) have benefited greatly as the academic health department program has been a pipeline of well qualified public health graduates into their employment.
“It is imperative for LHD to create a welcoming environment for young professionals to be drawn towards. That means having a strong foundation of excellence, but also the willingness to try new ideas the recently graduated students bring. LHD can offer the why we do it and new professionals can assist with improved how to do it,” states Թ City health commissioner Joan Seidel, RN, MA.
Wayne County Health Commissioner Nick Cascarelli, Ed.D., sees this Town and Gown program as a great resource for his rural health district. He best sums it up when he says: “We appreciate the partnership with the Թ State College of Public Health. I can say with full confidence we are a better health district as a result of the collaboration.”
The strategic use of practitioner and academic partnerships to enhance preparation of future public health leaders is not a new idea. This concept was previously used in 1992 with the establishment of “The Council of Linkages Between Academia and Public Health Practice,” and introduced to Ohio by C. William Keck, M.D., M.P.H., FACPM, while he was serving as the Chair of Community Medicine at NEOMED and as Health Director for the City of Akron, Ohio.
“Academic health department partnerships give academicians a place to test their ideas, help teach their students, and contribute to community service,” says Dr. Keck. “Public health practitioners add to their capacity to serve their communities and gain partners for exploring new and innovative ideas to improve education, knowledge, and service.”
For more information on becoming an Academic Health Department, contact Dean Sonia Alemagno at salemagn@kent.edu.