Dawn Mapatano was a Master of Public Health student at Jackson State University with a concentration in Epidemiology when she served as a Region IV PHTC Pathways to Practice Scholar in the fall of 2020. In her field placement, Dawn worked with the West Central Alabama Area Health Education Center (AHEC) to assess opioid use disorder treatment needs. Here is Dawn’s reflection on her experience in her own words:
This field placement appealed to me initially because I saw that they worked with the rural community of southern Alabama and I had not had an opportunity to work with in a rural community because I have always worked and lived in an urban area. Learning that the focus of the activities that I would be working on was the immense issue of opioid addiction and the opioid crisis currently occurring in southern Alabama really intrigued me. I had not previously had the opportunity to work directly on an issue that is domestically centered but also has global ramifications. The survey that our team created to assess the needs of the community is a concept I was familiar with due to the coursework that I have taken as a master’s of public health candidate. It was intriguing to see how something that I had only seen in practice within a global public health context like a need’s assessment was also applicable within a domestic space.
This experience helped me to become more culturally competent because I had to think about an issue that I had no previous experience with. I was tasked with then displaying sensitivity to the people who have been placed in those contexts. In the initial phone calls, I talked to community members who were involved in providing resources for people addicted to opioids. I was able to figure out ways to communicate the reason this grant would also be helpful for the southern Alabama community. Learning to use Qualtrics for the first-time is also a useful skill gained from this experience as I now know how to create surveys and assess and analyze the data that come out of these surveys.