Incorporating Public Health Practice Partnerships and Principles to Enhance Student Learning Experiences

Successful public health campaigns are not created in a vacuum; they require participation from multiple partners throughout various stages of development, implementation and evaluation.  Students in a six-week intensive MPH course designed public health campaigns using strategies such as social marketing to promote behavior change.  Practice principles and tools such as CDCynergy Lite: Social Marketing Made Simple: A Guide for Creating Effective Social Marketing Plans¹, CDC's Gateway to Health Communication and Social Marketing Practice², CDC's Audience Insights³, and CDC's Health Communicator's Social Media Toolkit⁴ were used to guide the campaign development process.  Learning experiences were enhanced through academic-practice partnerships with statewide organizations and the state health department.  As a result, in addition to learning theory, students gained practical skills and techniques from public health partners who were designing communication materials in the midst of addressing environmental threats from coal ash, legal services needed by low-income tenants, and an HIV outbreak in the southern part of the state.  Process and outcome evaluation of the students' campaign developments were conducted using feedback from public health partners, peer-reviews, and research-based criteria in the Clear Communication Index⁵.  Lessons learned from this course, based on student feedback from an audience response system (ARS) and course evaluations, could be applied to similar practice-based public health courses.

References

¹Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.  CDCynergy Lite: Social Marketing Made Simple - A Guide for Creating Effective Social Marketing Plans. Retrieved from http://www.cdc.gov/healthcommunication/pdf/cdcynergylite.pdf

²Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Gateway to Health Communication and Social Marketing Practice. Retrieved from http://www.cdc.gov/healthcommunication/

³Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.  Audience Insights. Retrieved from http://www.cdc.gov/healthcommunication/audience/index.html

⁴Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.  (2014). The Health Communicator's Social Media Toolkit. Retrieved from http://www.cdc.gov/healthcommunication/ToolsTemplates/SocialMediaToolkit_BM.pdf

⁵Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.  (2014).  Clear Communication Index. Retrieved from http://www.cdc.gov/ccindex/