Orange County | NC AHEC Program Office

Carlee McConnell and Amy Reid, NC AHEC Program Office Interns

For the 2010-2011 academic year, the NC AHEC Quality Improvement team employed Carlee McConnell and Amy Reid – two interns working toward their Master of Public Health degree at the Gillings School of Global Public Health at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Reid and McConnell worked with the Improving Performance in Practice Program (IPIP) and Regional Extension Center (REC) based at the NC AHEC Program Office in Chapel Hill. During their internship, they:

• planned and executed the initial wave of implementation of a statewide knowledge management system using PBWorks, a tool available to all AHECs through the AHEC Digital Library.
• assessed and documented functionality of ncipip.org, an online data capture and reporting system practices engaged in AHEC’s practice support program use to monitor how well they provide clinical care.
• created tools used to train AHEC consultants and practice improvement teams about measures that help practices monitor how well they provide clinical care.
• created a template used to organize information for practices applying for Patient-Centered Medical Home (PCMH) recognition.

In the summer of 2011, Reid will go to Ghana to assist with an evaluation named Project Fives Alive! Reid believes her work with the NC AHEC was a benefit to her being chosen to work in Ghana. “They saw my experience with quality improvement (QI) through AHEC as a real asset - I'm really grateful for the knowledge and skills I've gained at AHEC,” said Reid. “I'm excited to get global health experience and get more into qualitative research.”

Project Fives Alive! is a partnership, funded by the Gates Foundation, between the Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI) and the Ghana National Catholic Health Service (NCHS), to assist and accelerate Ghana's faith-based and public health services to reach the country's fourth Millennium Development Goal (MDG) of reducing mortality in children under five years of age through the application of quality improvement methods.

McConnell will do her summer practicum in Austin, Texas, working with the Texas Childhood Obesity Prevention Policy Evaluation Project (TCOPPE) and with the Live Smart Texas coalition. “With TCOPPE, I will be helping to evaluate two policy changes - a WIC policy change to increase access to health foods and implementation of the Safe Routes to School program at certain schools across the state - to see if these policies have actually lead to changes and improved health of Texas children,” said McConnell.

For the Live Smart Texas coalition, she will be doing structured interviews with coalition members to see what work they have been doing surrounding childhood obesity and create a report about all of the work being done in the state.