Exercises - PH 415: Core Functions and Public Health Practice

In addition to a variety of learning activities, there are 3 instructor-evaluated activities associated with PH 415: (1) complete the individual exercise; (2) participate in a multi-learner conferencing exercise; and (3) complete and submit the assessment quiz. Each of these is explained below.

Learning Activities (Note: these ARE NOT to be submitted!)

A series of individual learning exercises for this module are provided below. Completing these exercises will familiarize you with the knowledge, skills and attitudes that relate to the competency expectation for this module that is described above. Note that learners are not required to submit written response for these learning exercises. Completing these exercises, however, will prepare you for components of this module that are assessed and scored.

  1. Read Chapter 5, Public Health: What It Is and How and Works, 3rd Edition.
  2. Review the organization of health responsibilities in Illinois (or another state of your choice) and generally describe how the essential public health services are delegated and carried out among various offices and agencies of state government (not just by the state health department!) You can access the State of Illinois web site directly or through the site for the Illinois Department of Public Health. (For other states, the official state web site is usually "http://www.state.stateinitials.us"....for Illinois this would be http://www.state.il.us).
  3. Review the case study Snow on Cholera: Part 2 and describe the extent to which Snow's activities in battling cholera 150 years ago reflect the current framework for public health practice as characterized in the core function and essential public health services frameworks.
  4. What role do tools such as PATCH, APEXPH, and MAPP play in carrying out public health's core functions and essential services at the local level? (APHA's Guide to Implementing Model Standards: Eleven Steps Toward a Healthy Community and Community Strategies for Health: Fitting in the Pieces may be helpful here.)
  5. The Chicago Department of Public Health has asked for your advice as to whether they should enhance, maintain, or transfer (to either the private or public sector) their current clinical service activities. How would you approach this task and what advice do you think you would give? Why??
  6. You are the new administrator of a the Macon (Illinois) County Health Department (see Community Health Status Indicators for Macon County and, of course, there is more information available in the IPLAN data set). Your newly elected county board president has ordered you to develop new health-related initiatives that will improve the health of the county's residents. How would you approach this charge?
  7. Review Kristine Gebbie's case study entitled "Building a Constituency for Public Health.") In what ways were public health's core functions not being addressed at the time Gebbie became state health director in Oregon? Which of the three public health core functions was most strengthened or improved through constituency building efforts in this case study?
  8. Review the progress of the past century related to reducing the toll from heart disease and stroke (Decline in Deaths from Heart Disease and Stroke in the Century of Progress in Public Health case study), and related year 2010 objectives and leading indicators (such as Figure 5-3 from the text, "Participation in Regular Physical Activity, U.S., 1990-1997"). To what extent is there a strong constituency group (or groups) for these issues? How would you go about building or strengthening a constituency base for these issues?
  9. After reviewing The Past and Future of Public Health Practice, identify the public health practitioner (past or present) that you most admire and the reasons or criteria that led you to this choice.

Evaluated Activities (Note: these ARE to be submitted!)

(1) Individual Exercise

Each learner will submit a response to the following exercise. Approximately 500 words per response is suggested! Produce your response on a separate document to be uploaded at the "Submit Assignments" link. Please use "PH 415 Individual Exercise" as the title of your submission.

In order to complete this conferencing exercise, you will need to download a file with a community priority setting simulation and then run that simulation on your computer. The simulation exercise may take you several hours to complete. It will result in the development of priorities based on your consideration and scoring of various health problems. When you have completed the simulation, list the priorities that you identified and submit them at the PH 415 Individual Exercise site.

Here is what you need to do in order to download and configure this simulation on your computer.

  1. Download the following file to your computer. It is large (1.4. MB) so it may take a few minutes depending on the speed of your connection to the Internet. This file will come to you as a compressed file (a file with a *.zip extension) and you will need to follow the instructions below to uncompress the file. Click on Setting Priorities for your Community (a *.zip file) (1.4 MB) to initiate the download.
  2. You will need a program such as WinZip to uncompress the file. You can download and install the evaluation version at: http://www.winzip.com if you do not already have such a program on your computer.
  3. Once you have this program installed all you need to do is click on the file name community_prorities.ZIP in your windows explorer and the program will automatically uncompress. You will need to identify where you want the files saved to (you can create a folder called "community" and place them there).
  4. Once uncompressed then click on the file called "Priorityv4.exe" and the program will start.
  5. Then, have fun doing the simulation and be sure to record the priorities that you come up with at the end of program, as well as those that were developed by the community planning group.

(2) Conferencing Exercise

Add your contributions to this multi-learner conferencing exercise. Produce your response on a separate document to be uploaded at the "Submit Assignments" link. Please use "PH 415 Conferencing Exercises" as the title of your submission. Your response should be less than 300 words.

After completing the simulation for the PH 415 Individual Exercise, this conferencing exercise calls for you to compare the priorities that you developed through this exercise with those from the community planning group in the simulation. After reviewing similar submissions from other learners, your task is to (a) indicate similarities and differences with the list developed by the community planning group in the simulation, and (b) explain why and how the differences occurred.

(3) Assessment Quiz

Follow the LearningSpace link to the Assessment Quiz. You may be asked for your login ID and password to access the quiz through your Preparedness Center Personal Page. Complete the quiz and submit your responses. You make take the quiz several times.

Course Evaluation: All learners are asked to electronically complete a Course Evaluation Questionnaire; this is available to you as an electronic form and will be transmitted to a data base without your identity being known, and your instructor will have no way to link your identity to your comments. Before participating in these course evaluation activities, students should review the specific learning objectives established for this course (and others you may have taken as part of this series); these are available in the Syllabus. Evaluation of the course should focus on the extent to which these objectives were achieved.

PH 415 Exercises last revised July 5, 2005 (dkapadia)