Practice Title: LAC DPH Contact Tracing Student Internships: Building Future Leadership in a Public Health Crisis
Department: Los Angeles County Department of Public Health
Size: Large (Population of 500,000+ people)
State: California
Summary of Practice:
Los Angeles County’s Department of Public Health (LAC DPH) is the principal public health body for the County of Los Angeles, a 4,000+ square mile jurisdiction with 10,000,000+ inhabitants. DPH regularly employs approximately 5,000 staff in work from epidemiology, disease control and public health investigation to disease prevention, chronic disease management and environmental health. Attachment A details LA County’s ethnic and economic diversity more precisely.
DPH has managed LA County’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic since January 2020, with the formation of the COVID Incident Command System (ICS). Children’s Medical Services (CMS) pioneered the launch of the Case and Contact Tracing Interview Branch (CCIB) in March 2020. Over the past two years, CCIB has grown and incorporated a fully comprehensive electronic data management system and has onboarded 4,500+ case interviewers and contact tracers (from DPH, other LAC Departments, the State and other sources) at the peak of COVID activity.
In Summer 2020, CMS expanded CCIB to include student internships, envisioning that it would solve multiple challenges by helping:
-Public health students fulfill internship requirements for their degrees when other internships were no longer available due to the pandemic;
-Students intern remotely and away from their schools due to lock-down measures;
-Students witness and contribute during a seminal moment in what may be the most important public health response in their careers.
In two years of offering CCIB student internships, CMS has worked with 29 colleges and universities, and will have interned 866 students.
The CCIB student internship program also greatly benefits DPH by:
-Alleviating DPH staff of student internship responsibilities when most of them had been deployed to COVID or absorbed the work of colleagues who had been reassigned;
-Ensuring continuity of DPH’s critical mission to help shape future public health leaders;
-Supplementing the workforce at no additional cost to the County.
It is estimated that the student interns contributed a total of 60,000 work hours through Summer 2021 (and they continue to date), equaling 35 FTEs annually and saving the County an estimated $2,973,772 in payroll and associated costs.
The student internship structure was aligned according to school-based teams conducting contact tracing on the weekends. Schools were required to commit to 7 - 21 student teams, with designated student leads; the students committed to at least 120 hours over 15 weeks, including 40 hours of training. Students had to work in 8-hour shifts at least once a week.
Contact tracing, overall, is an effective mechanism for bridging equity gaps, securing access and services for hard-to-reach populations, and providing essential information and education to disenfranchised and vulnerable communities. Likewise, the student internship workforce has reflected the make-up of LA residents. Interns have from public and private universities throughout the country, are first-generation and returning students, and have crossed all educational, economic, ethnic, linguistic, familial and generational backgrounds. This workforce has helped contact tracing “level the ‘equity’ playing field” and has positioned student leaders in key roles communicating with a diverse and changing LA County population.
LAC DPH Contact Tracing Student Internships: Building Future Leadership in a Public Health Crisis
Category
Workforce and Leadership