Hello MPH ... It's Nice to See You Again

Well things got going bright and early this morning.  There is quite a group of people in the class: a bunch of accelerated and MSN nursing students, a couple active military personnel, some MPH students and TONS of international aid/relief work experience (I helped to hold down the fort on the domestic side).  When everyone was going around introducing themselves I was taken aback.

The first day was a lot of intro stuff/terms (the acronyms were flying around the room) and discussions of major disaster/hazard events over the past few years.  Even though I have NO emergency disaster training/experience and only a little international work compared to the others (three months doing some health education in Uganda), I was surprised at how relevant my resume was to what we were discussing; a lot of the fancy MPH terms also came flooding back.

During my last year of grad school we discussed the Community Oriented Primary Care cycle quite a bit.  By the time we graduated we could recite the thing backwards, forwards, sideways, upways, downways ... you get the idea.  Yesterday we discussed a similar Disaster Cycle.  

Take away message from today (or at least the one I am giving you): It is all about the assessment!!  Without defining who your population is you are sunk.  Without figuring out what the problem is or determining the difference between the perceived risk/problem and actual risk/problem you will get nowhere.