By Eva Briggs, MD
During a recent trip to visit Colorado, I was able to do a mini-interview with Lisa Newhouse, public health professional and co-creator of the podcast Public Health Party available on Spotify.
My first question was, what is public health? Lisa defines this as addressing health concerns upstream in order to prevent illness and injury in the population.
What education is needed to work in public health? Lisa has a Master of Public Health degree, the most common credential for those working in the field. Each program has specific prerequisite courses which can be earned during an undergraduate college degree. The degree could be a Bachelor of Arts in public health, although many other fields of study include the necessary requirements. Lisa’s undergraduate major was psychology.
Employers of public health professionals include hospitals, government, nonprofits and philanthropic organizations. It’s a field with considerable variety. Lisa began her career working for the Veteran’s Administration hospital system. She performed research with veterans. She worked on several projects including telehealth and prosthetic limb procurement software. A later job with a state health department involved administrative work for a contracting team. In her current position with a local health department, she has served in a variety of roles. Her responsibilities have included community health assessment, public health improvement planning, data collection regarding mental health, as well as partnership building with other government agencies and nonprofits.
I asked Lisa her personal favorite of those tasks. She voted for community health assessment, while admitting that biostatistics is her least favorite part of the job.
What motivated Lisa to start her own public health podcast? She stated that she feels this field is important but that there were few good public health podcasts. Many seemed too dry and institutional. She wanted to develop a podcast that people would actually want to listen to. Her inspiration for topics includes current events. She also chooses topics that appear to be poorly understood by the public.
Lisa states that funding — or lack thereof — is one of the biggest challenges facing public health today. There are also bad policy decisions, often at the federal level, that impact the ability of public health professionals to perform their jobs.
Eva Briggs is a retired medical doctor who practiced in Central New York for several decades. She lives in Marcellus.