What do you do everyday?

I work at AzHHA twice a week, Tuesday and Thursday and we have the rest of the week to interview community members. Barb and Marcus (my supervisors) allowed us to pick a demographic group that we are interested in interviewing and I picked the over 50 population because I know quite a few people in this age group. I am know working with three other interns who also have attended or are attending ASU. I am glad that my group has some ASU background so we can bond. Each Tuesday is a field trip day or a guest lecture day, which usually means free lunch (yay!). Our first visit will be to tour the Arizona State Capital and meet with a member of the House of Representatives. We will also be having time to work on planning that weeks interviews starting on Tuesday. On Friday, we all regroup and analyze our group's interviews for that week.

Barb and Marcus have taught us a unique strategy for organizing our data. The process goes somewhat like this: outreach to an individual over 50 and plan a day to meet with them. After we meet up, (we can interview in groups or solo), we take notes about that persons healthcare and health experiences. We ask them questions such as, "what do you do to stay healthy?" and "tell me about your most recent healthcare experience." We like to keep the questions open ended so that we can dig deep and really learn about the person in this population. On Friday we take all these notes gathered from the interview and write each individual fact from the interview on a sticky note. Afterwards we put the sticky notes on the wall. After we get over 12 interviews we are allowed to begin grouping them into categories, such as "healthcare beliefs" and "insurance costs". We usually get a chance to work with Marcus and Barb to discuss the next weeks goals/field trips. They have given us a lot of freedom to begin working in a group and figuring out a game plan.

This is the building that I work in on the 14th floor! It is located on Central Ave and Thomas. The views are absolutely gorgeous.

The Organization

As I mentioned in an earlier post I will be interning for Arizona Hospital and Healthcare Association or AzHHA for short (pronounced azz-ha!) They are a statewide, nonprofit organization that is"devoted to collectively building better healthcare and health for the patients, people, and communities of Arizona". They form relationships with local hospitals as well as supporting organizations such as Blue Cross Blue Shield and United Blood Services of Arizona to name a few. They are focused on policy advocacy and have a representative who spends extensive time working in the Arizona State Capital to follow healthcare legislation flowing through Arizona. This representative is actually one of my supervisors and works extensively to advocate on behalf of Arizona hospitals and association interests. They send out a daily newsletter about health policy that occurred that day. It is shocking to see how health policy changes every day.

I will be working as part of an intern team with about twelve other individuals. We will be responsible for going out into the community to interview people in various populations about their opinions on healthcare and health. We have a group interview of 6-8 interviews a week. The populations are determined by how likely they are to vote in an upcoming election ranging from: independent/republican women, people over 50, and Latinos/Latinas. We will be going on field trips once a week and than meeting with other group the other days to discuss and analyze our data. The field trips are supposed to be helpful in our journey to learning more about healthcare.

These are my supervisors for the internship, Marcus and Barb. I look forward to working with them.