Summary of week 1 Matched with Competencies 

• 3.2: Deliver health education and promotion interventions.
  • 3.2.2: Collect baseline data.
  • 3.2.3: Implement a marketing plan.

One of my main responsibilities as an intern is to create all social media content for the year. I have been brainstorming what I want my educational posts to look like and include. I want to share tips on cancer prevention (primary prevention), how to detect cancer, and screening/diagnostic procedures (secondary prevention), and where they can find treatment if necessary (tertiary prevention). I started doing some preliminary research to use in my posts, but haven’t figured out how I’m going to store/track the information I find. That will be a focus this next week since a lot of my training and onboarding is out of the way.

• 6.1: Determine factors that affect communication with the identified audience(s).
  • 6.1.3: Identify communication channels (e.g., social media and mass media) available to and used by the audience(s). 

Through the social media posts that I will be curating, I’m trying to reach a few different audiences. The first audience being patients of UCBC to tell them about upcoming events we’re putting on and resources we have to support them. The second audience is donors who can help support the foundation through different types of donations. The third audience is physicians and staff so they are aware of events we’re putting on that they can suggest to their patients as well as internal events for continued education that get us donations. The final audience is general because we want to educate as many people as possible about cancer prevention strategies. Different audiences need different communication channels. For example, information for physicians and staff will go out in a newsletter through email, while general education will be posted on our Instagram and Facebook. We hope that patients will also see communications on social media, but we can’t guarantee it. That is why we post flyers all over the facilities about our events as well as talk to patients and hand out flyers when we have the time. This was a responsibility of mine this past week to advertise our Look Good, Feel Better event.

• 6.2: Determine communication objective(s) for audience(s).
  • 6.2.1: Describe the intended outcome of the communication (e.g., raise awareness, advocacy, behavioral change, and risk communication).
  • 6.2.3: Identify factors that facilitate and/or hinder the identified outcome of the communication.

Different communication will have different intended outcomes. Raising awareness is one of the biggest goals of our social media and other events. Raising awareness for cancer helps put it into people’s minds that it’s something they should be paying attention to. We will be posting about each cancer month and different cancer prevention and early screening tips. The intended outcomes for these posts is to educate the public on how they can prevent certain types of cancer as well as signs to look out for and the importance of screening for early diagnostics. The main factor that hinders these outcomes is the fact that our social media only reaches so far. We cannot reach every resident of Athens to share helpful, sometimes life saving information. This is because some may not know about us to follow us, some may not care about cancer prevention, and some may not have access to technology to follow us online. A factor that facilitates communication with patients is them being in person at the office. We are able to approach them to talk to them about events rather than hoping they see our post.

Reflection of week 1

• The first week of my internship went great! I have already been challenged out of my comfort zone by approaching patients and striking up conversations. I had to hype myself up for some of these conversations, but I’m proud of myself for doing it and working on my interpersonal communication skills. This week was a lot of onboarding, talking about expectations, learning where things are, and how things are run at UCBC Cares. My internship preceptors have been amazing! They’re allowing a lot of freedom in our work and trust us to get the job done. I’ve already learned so much from them. I’ve especially learned about gratitude and empathy from Amy. She is so intentional with the money she receives as a non profit to make sure that it spreads as far and wide as possible to help the most amount of people. This intentionality is really important when working in public health because we often don’t have the most resources and a lot of organizations are non profits. I’m excited to start working on my educational content next week and to host our first event the week after! I feel like I am making real change here and I’m grateful to be with UCBC Cares!