Public health is everywhere.
Kristie Egge, the supervisor of strategic initiatives for the Wood County Health Department, said that’s what makes public health interesting, challenging, and full of opportunities for local public health staff and students interested in entering the field.
“There’s a business case for public health. Education, financial wellness, and food security are all related to public health,” Egge said.
The wide range of topics that connect with public health is also what excited Egge about partnering with UniverCity Alliance. The Wood County Health Department partnered with UniverCity Alliance, which is based at the University of Wisconsin–Madison – from 2022-25 to improve health outcomes in rural communities using creative strategies.
“What excited me about getting to work with UniverCity is being connected to all the resources at UW–Madison that we otherwise really don’t have access to, and that includes the university staff and the really bright students who are in unique program areas that overlap with public health,” Egge said.
This partnership built on a history of collaborating with community partners to develop evidenced-based community health initiatives to meet the most pressing needs in Wood County. The projects completed during the partnership addressed a range of topics, including childcare, outdoor recreation, health equity, affordable housing, and reentry into the community after experiences in the justice system.
While public health outcomes can take time to realize in a community, Egge said having the ability to “put catalysts around a priority or innovative topic, or something we’ve been wanting to do for a long time” was a benefit to partnering with UniverCity.
A couple of the projects are yielding tangible impacts. A report documenting possible solutions to childcare challenges in Wood County helped local leaders secure substantial funding for the community through American Rescue Plan Act funding and other local sources.
“Students helped to frame out childcare issues, and we were able to utilize their research and knowledge, put that into proposals, and then go back to our county board to request funding,” Egge said. “It isn’t often that the county has dollars to be able to give back to the community like that.”
Another project is helping the county be more inclusive in recruitment and retention. The students reviewed the Wood County Employee Policy Handbook and provided suggestions for more inclusive policies and language, and they also created a hiring bias manual to provide suggestions for organizations to create a more equitable hiring process and diverse workplace for all employees.
These products were shared with the county’s human resources department, and there’s plans to share the hiring bias manual with other organizations in the community.
“So many organizations have blind spots they don’t even know about, and it’s exciting to think about how this could be something that benefits more organizations than just ours and has a broader community impact,” Community Health Planner Niki Lucht said.
Public health in practice
Reflecting on the partnership, Egge said another impact was exposing more students to public health and the range of innovative work that can be addressed in the profession. Gavin Luter, who was manging director during the partnership, said that is part of the “win-win” of UniverCity’s model.
“The partnership with Wood County allowed us to put into practice our model of listening to what local leaders need and getting them plugged into the perfect match on campus,” Luter said. “We also think it’s valuable for students to get out of the classroom and have these influential learning experiences where they can learn from local experts.”
UniverCity’s partnership engaged 30 UW–Madison students, including Zoe Walts. Walts is a PhD student in epidemiology focused on the intersection of biological and social determinants and colorectal cancer outcomes. Walts works with Dr. Shaneda Warren Andersen in Population Health Sciences and the Carbone Cancer Center.
Walts worked with Wood County through a graduate public health course to evaluate the return on investment of the Providers and Teens Communicating for Health (PATCH) Program in Wood County.
“It was really valuable to me as an epidemiologist in training to have health department staff show me what public health in practice actually looks like,” Walts said. “Local public health is a very different world than academic public health, so it was really useful for me to see the kinds of work that they were doing and really valuable to me in a professional development sense.”
Later, Walts continued working with Wood County for an independent study project and collected secondary data for the county’s community health assessment. Walts used this project to complete a community-engaged scholarship PhD minor. The connection to Wood County during Walts’ academic career emphasized the importance of connecting classroom learning with community-based work.
“Being in research, it’s easy to forget the impact that your work might actually have,” Walts said. “Bringing that back to the public health practice, you can see that some of this work I’m doing might actually improve the community – it’s not just going in an article no one’s ever read – some of this work actually can have an impact.”
This story was published in the June edition of the Wisconsin Counties Association Magazine. Read the issue here and a pdf version here.
–Abigail Becker