COVID-19 Impact Assessment and Future Strategies

This capstone project is in collaboration with Dr. Liz Mogford’s sociology capstone project titled Population Health Advocacy. The class was invited by the Whatcom County Health Department to conduct research on city and county Community Health Improvement priorities. These priorities include racial equity, youth mental health, housing and economic security. As part of a research team, we conducted interviews with 30 participants who were identified for their expertise in these priority areas. Our class was split into priority subgroups to conduct interviews and then, as an entire class, we analyzed our interviews to find commonalities across the three priorities. Our goal was to find the social determinants of health that could inform upstream solutions to the observed problems. After the analyzes by the priority subgroups were complete, I complied the analyzes and finalized the paper. The result is a document that helps inform programs, practices, and policy that were presented to the Health Department, the Board of Health, and the Public Health Advisory Board