After being awarded the GWSPH Center of Excellence in Maternal and Child Health
Fellowship Award for Summer 2024, I spent my summer as a Family Health Bureau Fellow at
the DC Department of Health (DC Health). The Family Health Bureau operates within the
Community Health Administration of DC Health and focuses on promoting health for women,
mothers, children, and families across the District of Columbia.
During my fellowship, I worked on a variety of maternal and child health related projects
and was able to intersect these projects with the discipline of my MPH program to better study
maternal and child health (MCH) policy and programs. My primary projects throughout the
fellowship were my practicum deliverables in which I assisted in helping with DC Health’s Title
V Maternal and Child Health Services Block Grant for the upcoming 2025-2031 Needs
Assessment and helped to create DC’s Maternal Health Strategic Plan in accordance with the
federal State Maternal Health Innovation Grant. In both projects, I completed policy research and
studied recent MCH data, programs, and policies to understand how DC Health can further help
improve health outcomes for DC women and children. I conducted literature reviews on existing
reports that display the policy landscape of maternal and child health in DC and utilized other
existing resources to compare the MCH programs and policies of various other states to see what
DC can consider implementing. It was exciting to see what policies and programs operate in
other states with different political landscapes compared to the District of Columbia and in turn,
how maternal and child health outcomes differ by state. These projects and this experience also
gave me the opportunity to better understand how the social determinants of health, health care
financing, insurance access, and state level powers all come into play when working to advance
MCH outcomes in DC.
Through this fellowship, I made incredible professional connections and was able to
improve my communications skills. Working with professionals in the public health field
allowed me to gain insight into the skills, such as coding and creating centralized themes, that
they utilize every day in their professions. As an aspiring public health and health policy
professional, I look forward to capitalizing on this experience and putting these skills and my
knowledge to use for future professional development.