Teaching the next generation of public health leaders at University of Memphis

Challenge

University of Memphis’s School of Public Health was preparing for re-accreditation of their MPH program. They needed strong evidence of the academic program meeting the accreditation standards and competencies. To meet these goals, Dr. Marian Levy, Associate Dean, needed tools to provide data on health, social determinants of health, and health equity in an easy to use, intuitive learning environment for her students.

Impact

Dr. Levy used the City Health Dashboard’s real-world (and free) data as part of an assignment in her course, Foundations of Public Health, one of the core requirements of the university’s MPH program. In the course, she guided students through exploring data on health and its drivers, covering complex public health topics using the cities and neighborhoods most familiar and meaningful to students - like Memphis, where their college is located, or their hometowns. Students then used the Dashboard’s data to research local health and social factors and develop policy briefs on an issue of importance they uncovered. They also appreciated that all data on the Dashboard is easily downloadable for further analysis and research opportunities.  For example, one student developed a policy brief on how the city of Memphis could use housing programs aimed at increasing home-ownership among those who have been disenfranchised from investment and building wealth. She used the Dashboard to frame and support these policies, focusing on neighborhood-level disparities in unemployment, child poverty, lead in housing and low birthweight – social drivers of health outcomes that have practical policies that can make a real impact. This MPH student appreciated the different ways of viewing data on the Dashboard, saying,“ The Dashboard was incredibly useful as a data tool to find important public health trends in the Memphis area. I appreciated that the data could be explored in a variety of formats, including scatter plots, maps, and in comparison to other areas or the US more broadly.”Dr. Levy continues to incorporate the Dashboard into her courses, finding it an ideal platform for teaching her students critical, foundational concepts of public health and health policy. Additionally, the integration of the Dashboard into the course helped the school meet an MPH foundational competency and achieve re-accreditation by the Council on Education for Public Health (CEPH) in 2021.