Those who have spent their careers in the trenches of healthcare and are now reading the uncertain headlines in the news each day and fearing for the future of healthcare, fear not! There are fresh crops of enthusiastic students, eager to make a difference and keep the ball rolling in the quest to improve healthcare, sprouting up in graduate programs starting across the nation this summer.

Having started the Johns Hopkins Masters of Public Health (JHSPH) program in July, it has been a thrilling month and will no doubt be a fast year with many choices to make for classes, volunteer opportunities, and research projects. The plethora of options was described by one former student as “going to the grocery store when you’re hungry.” Not to mention, each student shopping in the “grocery store” is a Type A overachiever with diverse interests and remarkable accomplishments under their belts. It is no exaggeration that it is difficult to get a seat in the first few rows of the lecture halls—it is just that kind of crowd.

Each day has been a new adventure with exciting speakers further energizing us and spurring new thoughts and ideas, laying the groundwork for our future studies this year. Countless fliers for seminars to attend cover the bulletin boards week after week, and we each have several hundred courses for credit from which to choose during our 11-month program.

As the summer session comes to a close and I find myself in the throes of final exams, I not only have learned the principles of epidemiology and environmental health but also have taken away several overarching lessons with widespread implications:

• Change is possible, even if the odds are against you. Dr. D.A. Henderson, former Dean at JHSPH, spoke to our class about the global campaign he led to eradicate smallpox in the 1960s when no infectious disease had ever been eliminated on such a large scale.
• Even if wide scale change is not immediately plausible, something—no matter how small—can still be done. For instance, Howard County, Maryland took it upon itself to help its own uninsured residents by launching the Healthy Howard Access Plan to provide basic health services to those unable to obtain or afford health insurance.
• The American people can successfully unite to affect healthcare change. Polio: An American Story (required reading for incoming MPH-ers) by David Oshinsky, a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian, depicts the true story of Americans coming together despite socioeconomic class or political party to find a vaccine for polio.

Needless to say, with just one term under my belt, the JHSPH motto “protecting health, saving lives—millions at a time” doesn’t seem such a far-reaching feat after all. This thinking that is shared with my classmates is proof that midterms and finals have not tarnished our raring-to-go attitudes or deflated our ideas and dreams about improving the health and lives of many. And hopefully knowing this will help some of my more seasoned colleagues out there rest assured and sleep a little easier.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 18th, 2009 at 6:44 am and is filed under Consumer Health Care, Health Professions, Health Reform. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.