Healthcare Workforce and the Student Health Ambassador Program - WNC HPI News Brief
Image credit: UNC Asheville
Transcript
WNC News Brief: Healthcare Workforce and the Student Health Ambassador Program
5/1/2024
AR: Andrew Rainey
AR: North Carolina, like the rest of the United States, is facing a massive healthcare workforce shortage.
With the state in need of nurses, caregivers, behavioral health specialists, physicians, and public health workers, a number of initiatives across the state are seeking to increase our healthcare workforce.
While some collaborations are looking big picture, like the NC Center on the Workforce for Health, in WNC, for example, other initiatives are exposing students to the healthcare field and are building pathways for those students to enter that workforce. One program led by the North Carolina Center for Health & Wellness (NCCHW), Mountain Area Health Education Center (MAHEC), and the Dogwood Health Trust, in partnership with a number of universities in that region, have connected students to the critical field of healthcare with the Student Health Ambassador (SHA) program, first as a response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Then Executive Director of the NCCHW, Dr Amy Lanou, explains . . .
AL: Our goal has been to collaborate across institutions to reduce the spread of COVID-19 on our 6 campuses and in the broader community. And to keep our campuses open and safe places to learn and work.
AR: With participants at UNCA, Mars Hill University, Western Carolina University, Brevard College, Warren Wilson, and Montreat Colleges, many students were looking for ways to have a positive impact on health on their campuses following the emergence of COVID-19.
KS UNCA: I decided to become an ambassador because I was, like I’m sure many other people were as well, nervous to come back to school in the middle of a pandemic.
JH Mars Hill: And so I wanted to be the kind of person that could help educate the people around me to help mitigate some of the fear that COVID brought on everybody so that’s why I became an SHA. I wanted to be useful.
KS UNCA: we were building the ship as we sailed. . .we were able to overcome and work together as a team to help create a variety of different programs to help keep students and campus members safe from covid.
AR: This role gave students the opportunity to impact health as well as a taste of what the field might have to offer after they graduated. . .
AS Montreat: I felt like this role perfectly combined all of those opportunities and it really gave me an opportunity to make a difference during a time where people were scared and there’s a lot of unknowns and this position allowed me to make a difference with the skills that I had at the time.
KS UNCA: Being an SHA has helped me drastically improve my leadership skills, and it's given me the ability to challenge myself by working on new projects with people. The group work, and being able to work as a team to create projects has been so incredibly challenging and so incredibly rewarding. . .
AR: By both being a part of the community and centering their fellow students’ experiences, SHAs were able to practice effective public health by bridging community need with institutional action.
JF Montreat: It gives you the opportunity to be a bridge between the student body and the faculty and staff that make decisions on behalf of the students, and so it was really great to present and bring to them the perspectives of the students and how these things might be taken in or viewed and how they might be changed so that they would be received better. . .
AS Montreat: We had institution leaders that would really want to hear what we had to say and implemented the ideas we had and that really made the difference with our institution and MAHEC is that they listened. They listened to students who often sometimes don’t feel listened to. . .
AR: An evaluation of SHA work found that students experienced improvements to their mental health and greater experiences of community. Here’s program manager, Kol Gold-Leighton:
KG: 90% surveyed believed the Student Health Ambassador Program demonstrated that their university cares about their health and wellbeing. . . And 70% of these students believed their mental health improved as a result of SHA activities they had engaged with.
AR: As the health and healthcare workforce shrinks in NC, initiatives like this which engage students at schools and universities across NC could be one tool to slow down this growing issue:
KG: When we surveyed SHAs we found that 97% by the end of the program reported building skills, including those in areas of communication, public speaking, and advocacy. And 46% demonstrated an interest in pursuing a health or health-adjacent career after participating in our programs.
AR: With 6 universities, 30 training sessions, 45 SHAs, and 933 projects, the SHA program, coming to an end in May of 2024, is one innovative example of efforts in NC to train a new generation of health and healthcare workers.
To learn more about SHA’s you can see measures of impact online on the Health Policy Initiative’s website at wnchealthpolicy.org. Special thanks to SHA program manager, Kol Gold-Leighton, as well as featured SHAs, Kat Stulpin, Joshua Hager, Amy Schlosser, and Jonathan Fogo.
From the Health Policy Initiative, I’m Andrew Rainey.
outro music
At the Lab We Work and Play’ by Good Old Neon from This Is the News, found on the FreeMusicArchive. It is licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0 DEED Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International
Resources/Links:
Practice Report: Student Health Ambassadors at Residential Campuses Contribute to Safer Campus Living and Learning during the COVID-19 Pandemic
Lanou A, Perry J, Perry L, Garland B, Hunt K, Gold-Leighton K. Journal of Higher Education Theory and Practice, 2021, 23(8).
UNC Asheville info page on Student Health Ambassadors - News pieces, media links, videos and other information relating to the SHA program.
