Wildfires

I hope that everyone affected by the fires are doing better. The whole world is rooting for you!

It was quite a harrowing journey for my family and I (especially our dog Ginger). We evacuated Ramona on Sunday night by waiting in a line of cars for 2 hours. Then our temporary place in Escondido got evacuated, so we moved to my cousin's house in San Marcos. We got to know my cousin's kids well- they are very cute, but after awhile they are a bit draining! Luckily we went back to Escondido with my will to procreate battered but still intact.

So we are back in Ramona- no drinking water still! People in my classes will be happy to know that we can take showers now. I know that it's whiny to complain about water in a disaster, but it was completely avoidable. Ramona Water District didn't ask for help when they needed to. In fact, they had to be ordered to ask for help. They also didn't have spare parts for the system. I mean, come on! There needs to be a cleansing of personnel in that company- my humble opinion.

There's also a lot that we should learn about disaster planning. Evacuating somewhere around 700,000 people and having them rome around the county.... was that necessary? I say this because they will have a lot of trouble evacuating people in the future. Especially in Ramona. They wouldn't let us back in after the fire danger was gone because there wasn't any water. My dad pointed out that they wouldn't have made us evacuate simply because the water was out. So that was inexcusable. Speaking of my dad, he did not want to evacuate. He's still a little peeved at me for threatening to stay with him if he refused to leave Ramona. In the cedar fires, my family did not evacuate (I wasn't here). Instead they single-handedly saved the house. The firefighters went to save the town of Julian. We live maybe 2 miles away from a fire department, so there's a bit of resentment there too. My point is that the actions of authorities during crisis may threaten future orders to evacuate. And then there's the whole fire plane debacle and the FEMA "newsconference". No comment. Ugh.

OK- end of rant. This shouldn't be misconstrued as being cold and thankless. Firefighters and emergency personnel saved San Diego. Everyone is thankful. It's good to vent and to point out problems. We shouldn't be sycophantic enough to ignore some constructive criticism, that's all!

Take care!

Week 8: Message Strategies

Today's in class example from CDCynergy really matched what I am doing at work. My work is a bit frustrating at this point. I designed a perfectly lovely Women's Health payroll stuffer. But my boss' boss' boss'... no diggy. So it's back to the drawing board. I thought I had this health communications thing down. Should I really be telling "Shakti Rising" how to better advertise for volunteers? Good thing I'm part of a group on the latter project. As for my payroll stuffer- well, maybe I needed to be tossed down a few pegs. I'm going to look into the CDCynergy stuff a little closer. Anything can help at this point cause I've hit a wall!

Speaking of work, I will be helping with a fluoride/varnish dental clinic for Share the Care on Saturday. It's nice to work in the field sometimes!

Another thing that struck me in class was a "mad lib" style motivation/audience centering exercise. Here it is:

If I do instead if I will because .

So let's apply this:

If I actually work on writing my comprehensive exam paper instead of continuing to procrastinate, I will survive grad school in one piece because I will be able to graduate in December.

Or something like that. Still a little fuzzy on the support info part. Maybe this will work if I paste it on my mirror?
Blech.

Health Literacy

We talked about Health Literacy in class this week. Most people seemed to enjoy the video, but I felt a little more ambivalent about it. A lot of the ways they discussed functionally illerate people reminded me of the article "Is there a hard to reach audience?" Excuses for not targeting hard to reach populations (like the functionally illiterate) in the proper way has included talk about how illiterate people have conceptual deficits. But the article said that this isn't true and that this idea and others like it labels people. It makes failing to target and effectively reach them their fault instead of placing the blame with public health professionals. Anyways, the video very briefly seemed to mention conceptual differences. It wasn't obvious, but I thought a bit of the negative attitude exposed in the hard to reach article was there. Truthfully, I also thought the psychologist who tests motorcycle focus groups was a bit of a sell-out. I could be biased though, especially given the product. I tend to think that driving cars is unhealthy, so motorcycling definitely doesn't fall in the health-promoting category for me.

I thought that the SMOG/FOG test was an interesting idea and a good tool. But what about words like "exercise", "physical activity", etc.? We use those words all of the time even though they have 3 syllables and would thus raise the reading level. I guess there's a balance. My group got it down to 6th grade reading level. Is that too low? Would people be offended? In the end, this lab can help us reach the low literacy group. But the situation seems more dire than that, so should we actually be focusing on more visual messages? It was good to get a reality check and to get out of the ivory tower. My job doesn't always allow me direct access to the community so it's easy to forget about readability. As students, we have to separate classwork from work in the community. We are expected to work from a higher level of literacy in classes, so it's easy to let that spill over into health communication pieces for the community.

Dilemmas

Dr. Engelberg started the class by asking all of us what we tell people when they ask for health advice. The answer he wanted from us was that most people don't want our advice; they really just want to be heard and perhaps validated. But I got stuck on what advice I feel qualified to give. The fact is that I don't feel too confident about giving advice. I think that grad school teaches us how to think but not what to think. Sometimes I wish I could have the latter though! Once I have my Masters, the pressure will be on from friends, families and strangers to give health advice. So it's a timely issue. Maybe that's one reason why I want to go into Nursing- so I can get a bit of the other side and be taught what to think. Is that so bad? I'm not sure yet.

As I said in my comments on the main blog, I am very nervous about the group project! But I do have a great group and a great organization to work with. So hopefully it will work out. The more I get to know the organization, the better I like it and the more pressure I feel to do right by it.

Hopefully these dilemmas will get worked out...