Blog

As we all know nearly two years into the pandemic, COVID-19 is a viral, respiratory disease easily transmitted through direct contact via respiratory droplets (Centers for Disease Control [CDC], 2021b). It has become a global pandemic that has had a large effect in the local community home to the University of Florida - Alachua County. Unfortunately, there are many risk factors put individuals at increased risk for severe COVID-19. One risk factor that many people are not aware of is...

The Returning to the Ranks (R2TR) program is a multi-phased program focused on readiness and reintegration of military members returning from combat deployments. R2TR seeks to not only help service members assimilate back into day-to-day life while simultaneously dealing with the aftereffects of combat stressors and ACEs, but also help families adjust to these members coming back as well. Additionally, with success of the first two phases, R2TR will reformat resiliency training on a much...

For my PHC6451 class, I created a hypothetical multi-level public health intervention, as the "Creative Director for ResilientU". This intervention is set to target individuals living in Jackson, Mississippi, the city with the highest obesity rates in the state of Mississippi and across the country (Oliver, 2017; Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, 2019). Using the CDC's (2021) Social Ecological Model (SEM), I looked at each separate level (individual, relationship, community, and society) to...

The public health issue of concern is traumatic experiences specific to immigrant and refugee children under the age of seventeen, that negatively affect the neurology and development of these children. The target population for this analysis is immigrant children, specifically non-white immigrants and international refugees within the low socioeconomic realm. In 2016 alone, fifty million children were migrated or forcibly displaced (Wood, 2018). Yet, there is no existing literature on the...

The translation to the name of this resilience interventions is "Always Forward, Never Back" and the acronym SANA-- means HEAL. This intervention focus on building resilience within the Hispanic/Latino immigrant population in Immokalee, Florida of all ages. The rural town of Immokalee in South West Florida may look small, but it houses more than 20,000 farmworkers (Flocks, 2020). The farmworkers range in all ages, and many travel with their families. This community is also known to have...

This semester, my peers and I were tasked with creating a multi-level public health and resilience building intervention. We were to select a topic, target audience, and ensure it connected with the CDC social ecological model. I chose to focus on childhood food insecurity in Guilford County, NC. My intervention is titled "Growing Up". This intervention uses innovation and community collaboration to ensure every child has access to nutritious foods. The primary focus is to connect business...

Military spouses are an important part of the United States military services and essential to the Department of Defense (Keller et. al, 2018). A military spouse’s satisfaction in the quality of life afforded during their spouse’s service impacts service member retention rates (Lubens and Bruckner, 2018). Family dysfunction and distress can negatively impact a service member’s focus on the military mission and prevent deployment (Schneider and Martin, 1994). Military spouses are considered...

The LGBT Youth Teacher Training program aims to create a positive and safe school environment for LGBT youth. LGBT youth are disproportionately affected by suicide and poor mental health outcomes due to limited social support, isolation, and negative events rooted in bullying, homophobia, and transphobia (Siljestrom, 2021). Data has shown that LGBT students who did not believe that their school environment was safe often faced higher rates of bullying, no source of an adult role model who...

For my Resilience Building course, I created a multi-level resilience intervention for LGBTQ+ survivors of intimate partner violence (IPV). IPV can lead to the infringement of human rights, physical injuries, poor mental health outcomes, and familial disturbances, making it a critical public health issue to address (Patra et al., 2018). This intervention was designed to be implemented in North Carolina, as it has some of the highest rates of IPV when compared to other states, with nearly 44%...

When tasked to develop a program to build resiliency in a target population within a demographic area, I chose to target nurses in the United States. I couldn’t narrow down my geographical area because this is a nationwide problem. The southeast seemingly the worst. Being an ICU nurse for the past twelve years I have noticed a shift in priorities. Most of us became nurses because we are healers, we truly care about other people. Yet, in the span of my nursing career I have noticed that it no...

One of the most critical public health issues to date is the mental health crisis that the COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated amongst people of color in the United States. Through our trauma-informed facility, RISE Creative Lab, our mission is to tend to the mental health needs of people of color in the vibrant NYC community. RISE Creative Lab stands for resilience-based, integrated social arts education. It is a trauma-informed educational arts lab that aims to bridge boundaries between...

For my multi-level public health resilience-building intervention, I am designing an intimate partner violence (IPV) education and prevention program for the Bangladeshi community in Miami, Florida. This intervention will target all levels of the social-ecological model to build resilience by emphasizing accountability and advocating for systemic change at the societal and cultural level. The intervention aims to promote healing from adverse childhood experiences in order to work on...