Expanding Interprofessional Education: Moving from Silos to Full Integration
NikkiHammond_internshipreport
1. Nicole Hammond
December 12, 2014
CPH 493A report
Internship Report
Skin Cancer Institute at University of Arizona Cancer Center
a. The Agency:
To fulfill my internship requirements to obtain a degree from the University of Arizona
Mel and Enid Zuckerman College of Public Health, I attained an internship at the Skin Cancer
Institute at the University of Arizona Cancer Center. Since Tucson, Arizona has some of the
highest rates of skin cancer in the world, the disease is prevalent in the community.
Unfortunately, awareness is low. The agency’s mission includes Outreach, Research, Patient
Care, and Education, all of which I witnessed firsthand in my experience.
Established in April 2005, the Skin Cancer Institute (SCI) is a fairly new non-profit
organization. SCI owes its development to the Bert W. Martin Foundation, who provided it with
an institute office in the Arizona Cancer Center and a van for transportation of materials. In
years since its inception, SCI has established several community partners who continue to
provide funding for the organization. One major partner we worked with this semester was
Sanofi Aventis, a pharmaceutical research company located in Oro Valley. At Sanofi Aventis, we
conducted free skin cancer screenings for the employees to express our gratitude for their
gracious contributions.
In my experience with the Skin Cancer Institute, I learned about the structure of a non-
profit, health-promoting organization. My preceptor, Denise Spartonos, worked as a
Community Outreach Liaison, which includes establishing relationships with community
2. partners and planning events to promote sun safety and skin cancer prevention. Her coworkers
Tracie and Lisa worked as a health educator and an office manager, respectively. Dr. Robin
Harris, an Associate Professor of Public Health, supervised these employees in the Behavior and
Outreach department and worked closely with many clinical doctors and researchers employed
by SCI. The structure of SCI is indicative of an inter-professional medical non-profit
organization.
b. Description of the population:
My main responsibilities at the Skin Cancer Institute were to schedule and attend
presentations in middle schools and high schools in the Tucson area. For these Project SASS
(Students Are Sun Safe) presentations, the target population is middle school and high school
aged students in Tucson. Since skin cancer can occur in people of all ages and early prevention
is key in decreasing incidence of the disease, reaching out to the youth is elemental.
Additionally, SCI research suggests that rates for skin cancer are higher in Arizona than any
other state (Skin Cancer Institute, 2013). For this reason, the program intentionally targeted
teenagers in Arizona with a message of preventing skin cancer and avoiding tanning beds.
Other populations reached by SCI are the general population at community events and several
specific populations (such as the elderly population at the Saddle Brooke Health Fair).
Additionally, SCI is planning on expanding its program for implementation in elementary school
classrooms with a puppet show. Everyone can use a lesson in skin cancer prevention because
everyone is at risk for the disease.
3. c. Internship work plan:
Goals: Working with the Skin Cancer Institute this past semester sparked my interest in
behavioral health and nonprofit agencies that go out into the community and prevent disease.
As an intern for the Skin Cancer Institute, I will learn the procedures involved in community
activity planning. This will be helpful for a career in behavioral health after graduation.
Objectives: To gain a career in behavioral health or as an employee at a nonprofit organization,
I will continue with classwork, including this internship. In the internship, I will spend at least
10 hours scheduling classroompresentations with schools. I will spend the remaining 240 hours
attending presentations and events, including packing and driving the Skin Cancer Institute van.
Scheduling and rescheduling will also be done throughout the semester, adding to the total
number of hours.
Proposed Activities: My main activities as an intern will be to contact teachers and schools to
schedule Project SASS presentations. After scheduling the dates with the teachers, I will create
a schedule for the Project SASS students to select their hours from. I have to make sure that the
students have enough opportunities to get their credit hours. I also will be responsible for
driving the students to the presentations and filling in to teach if there are any absences.
d. Narrative of internship duties
This year, I had the privilege of traveling to five different middle schools and high
schools in the Tucson area to teach sun safety lessons in the form of Project SASS (Students Are
Sun Safe). My role was mostly supervisory. I would contact the teachers either through email
or through personal contact, such as when I attended the Arizona Sonoran Desert Museum’s
4. Teacher Appreciation Night in August. After finding a teacher who was interested, had a class
of 6th-12th grade students, and taught in the Tucson area (some Sierra Vista and Vail schools
were unavailable for presentations due to transportation complications), I would set up a time
and date and then create a “Doodle” poll for the SASS-trained public health and medical
students to sign up. Doodle.com was a valuable resource in scheduling, especially with college
students with various school and work schedules. I also had to correspond with the students to
gage their availability and need for credit hours.
Then when I had enough students signed up, I would load the van up, print out
handouts, and drive the SASS students to the school. Once at the school, my responsibility was
monitoring the classroom to make sure that the audience was paying attention to the
presentation and answering questions on their worksheets. If there weren’t enough students
to present, I had to fill in. For one set of presentations, I performed two of the three parts for
four periods in a row. It was important for me to know the information about skin cancer
extremely well because the students, teachers, and SASS students would look to me for
answers. Sometimes I would do my own research in order to answer a question but
communication through the SASS program and with the health educators at the Skin Cancer
Institute has helped me to develop an extensive knowledge of skin cancer prevention.
The most important pre-requisite to this internship was enrollment in CPH 497S – Skin
Cancer Prevention in the Community Setting. For two credits, I completed five online modules
and quizzes, attended a three-hour training, attended health fairs and performed presentations
for twelve hours.
5. I also used skills I learned from CPH 350 – Principles of Health Education and Health
Promotion. In this class I learned how to perform community assessments and how to develop
program plans accordingly. At the Skin Cancer Institute, part of setting up for a health fair
included assessing the target population and bringing the necessary materials for them. If it
was family-oriented, we would bring coloring books and activities for kids; at skin cancer
screenings we would stock up on informational brochures and business cards.
This past spring, I took CPH 459 – Data Management as a one-credit course, but I
learned much about analyzing data. In my duties at the Skin Cancer Institute, I was in charge of
distributing, collecting, inputting, and analyzing data from Project SASS presentations and skin
cancer screenings. Though I did not have to use extensive data codes as I did in STATA
programs in the class, the basic knowledge of data analysis helped me in my internship.
Additionally, my work in CPH 376 – Introduction to Biostatistics helped me with basic
math functions and data management. Surveys are widely used in public health to gage
performance and to evaluate the effectiveness of a program. Learning biostatistics helped me
with analysis of the student, peer, and teacher evaluation data forms. The chart below shows
the averages of all the ratings according to the surveys distributed to each student taught
Project SASS over the semester.
6. 1 I enjoyed the Project SASS PowerPoint and activities
2 I learned a lot from this presentation
3 I felt that the presenters were knowledgeable and
friendly
4 I plan to use the ACE message to protect my skin from
the sun
5 I think Project SASS should continue to be taught in
the future
The data used in this survey was collected from 385 students throughout the semester.
An additional 76 students were not surveyed at DeGrazia Elementary School. Including these
un-surveyed students, a total of 461 students were taught with the Project SASS program this
semester. Looking at the qualitative statistics shows that an overwhelmingly large amount of
the population not only enjoyed the presentations but also planned to implement them in their
lives.
These courses were the main sources of preparation for my internship at the Skin
Cancer Institute. My internship activities changed somewhat from the work plan activities I
wrote at the beginning of the semester. Although most of my responsibilities included
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3
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6
4 4.2 4.4 4.6 4.8 5
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2
3
4
5
Average Survey Ratings
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7. scheduling and attending presentations, a lack of participation from the enrolled students and
the MedCat volunteers meant fewer presentations than previous semesters. In order to fulfill
the 250-hour requirement, I had to attend more community events and health fairs. This
ordinarily would not have been my priority duty, but I was given the opportunity to set up and
transport students to health fairs in order to hand out sunscreen bottles and promote skin
cancer prevention. I am actually glad that I was given responsibilities outside of my intended
work plan because I learned more about public health from attending various health fairs.
e. Critique of the internship
Taking CPH 497S last semester prepared me for this internship as I attended community
events and learned the Project SASS (Students Are Sun Safe) presentation. Acquiring the
internship at the Skin Cancer Institute was like a continuation of the class. Instead of merely
attending the events and presentations, I was in charge of putting the events together and
coordinating with community representatives and students. I was glad that I had taken the
class before and was prepared for the internship.
Much of the internship involved administrative work and data entry. I enjoyed learning
these skills, as I know that I will probably use them in my public health career. Although I
learned much about the way a non-profit organization operates, I would have preferred to
learn more about the business aspects, such as grant writing or budget managing. I think that I
am amply qualified for an entry level position as a community outreach coordinator in a health
promoting organization, but still have much to learn about the operations of a non-profit
organization.
8. Future interns for the Skin Cancer Institute should be more heavily utilized in
development of materials. Since many of the audiences for Project SASS and some of the
community events were young, they did not enjoy many of the materials. For this reason, I
chose to update the SASS PowerPoint and work on developing materials for younger children.
The employees in the outreach department at SCI are very knowledgeable, but should look to
the incoming interns to relay generational trends in their health promotion tactics. For
instance, I noticed that students were not recognizing celebrities on the slides during the
presentation so I changed the pictures to younger starlets, as shown in my internship portfolio.
For future semester internships, it should be a mandatory requirement for the SCI intern to
update materials for cultural relevance.
