Cameron County Public Health serves as an on-site educational experience location for UTHealth Houston School of Public Health graduate students. This collaboration allows the potential public health professionals of tomorrow to experience the daily activities and projects within a local public health department. This summer we brought in our very first MD/MPH student intern, Josue Fonseca.
Josue is a third-year medical student at UTRGV who is dually enrolled as a Master of Public Health graduate candidate at UTHealth Houston. Josue’s interests in health policy and education aligned with an endeavor our department is currently undertaking accreditation through the Public Health Accreditation Board. As part of the PHAB requirements, a protocol must be identified and developed or updated for notifying the public of actions to take based on an enforceable activity granted to the health department. At the conclusion of his internship, Josue drafted the documentation needed to meet the PHAB requirement which focused on the CCPH Environmental Health Program’s general sanitation ordinance enforceable activity.
As an intern, Josue was able to attend several tabletop workshop meetings and department-led community events, such as Operation Border Health Preparedness. One noteworthy tabletop meeting he attended was with CCPH billing and eligibility clerks and clinical services program administration. The discussion focused on improving the clinical services encounter form data capture structure. Another tabletop workshop Josue attended involved the updating of the department’s roles, responsibilities and functions at the embarkation hub in the event of an evacuation due to a natural disaster. Josue is an advocate for public health among his medical student classmates and this educational experience served as a means for him to continue to be a proponent of public health’s work once he becomes a practicing clinician.
