Health Communication

Advancing Care: Nurse Practitioners, At-Risk Communities, and the Ever-Expanding Education that Puts Nurses at the Heart of Serving Communities in Need

Nurses have been playing a unique and vital role in our battles against disease for centuries. Since the 1960s in the US, nurses have been at the forefront not only of health care services but also of health care administration and management. Nurses continue evolving their skills and the profession itself to meet needs beyond even their own imaginations and comfort levels.

Safe Labor, Industry, and Business during a Pandemic

Q&A with Aurora Le

As states in the US slowly reopen their economies, industry and business leaders will need to think about worker safety in new ways, most importantly how to mitigate the spread of infectious disease while still maintaining other basic safety measures specific to their facility.

Returning to Work Safely in Michigan and across the US

Q&A with Aurora Le

As the US slowly reopens the economy, a variety of new safety measures will be needed to ensure worker safety, from engineering and administrative interventions for entire facilities down to personal protective equipment. These measures are not meant to hinder economic recovery but rather to reduce the incidence and prevalence of infectious disease to protect American workers and their families.

Public Health Surveillance: Immunity, Testing, and Contact Tracing

Q&A with Abram Wagner

Long before we could sequence a virus’s genome in a matter of weeks, we used public health tactics like contact tracing to sort out the movement of a disease in a population. Contact tracing is one of the “traditional” tools of epidemiologists. Today, we have more public health surveillance tools at our disposal, and we’ll need both the old and the new to bring COVID-19 under control.

Courage and Commitment: Staffing for Crisis Care

Q&A with Kelly Rakowski, MHSA ’93

What's it like to manage health care systems and personnel during a global pandemic? For an inside view, we connected with alum Kelly Rakowski, a national staffing solutions leader. She and her team are working across the country with organizations and with “hand raisers”—retired or out-of-work health care workers stepping forward to help fight the outbreak.

Social Distancing: Data Models for a Model Response to an Outbreak

Q&A with Peter Song

Biostatistics expert Peter Song and team have created a tool to assess the effectiveness of preventive measures in the fight against the COVID-19, still a new disease with many unknowns. The model lets us compare the impact of different levels of intervention so different locales can develop better strategies and policies to flatten the coronavirus curve.