2023 NYSPHC Fellowship Summit - A Review
Hello everyone, Dylan here again.
From the 11th to the 13th of December, the Niagara County Department of Health fellows as well as I took to Albany, NY to attend the 2nd annual New York State Public Health Corps (NYSPHC) Fellowship Summit. The summit focused on the theme of “Building Partnerships That Strengthen Public Health”, with the additional hope of connecting with fellows and public health professionals across New York. I aim to provide a synopsis of the summit as well as provide a taste of the experience I had there.
I will start with the events on December 11, the day prior to the start of the summit. I had essentially a half day at the Lockport (Shaw) office of the health department before we hit the road.
I left with two others at around 2 in the afternoon equipped with the poster that we would present on Tuesday and Wednesday in Albany. One of the people riding with me was a fellow; a bunch of the other fellows rode/drove in different vehicles.
I was tasked with controlling the music for the ride there and back, to which I did comply and created a 10 hour long playlist, which I would shuffle through. This worked reasonably well, at least for the first couple of hours. The playlist would stop if someone tried to play music from another device connected to my Spotify account, which it did, on both the ride there and the ride back, when someone hijacked it with Christmas music. Suppose it’s fitting for this time of year. We chuckled when this happened.
We arrived in Albany around 6:30 pm, having made only one stop on the way, at a sub shop not too far from the office, where I grabbed a steak sub to eat on the road. We parked in front of the Fairfield Hotel in downtown Albany where we would spend the next two nights. After getting the room key and putting my stuff in my hotel room, I returned to the lobby, where I waited for my boss and two other colleagues of my boss. We then walked over to a pub about a half mile from the hotel called McGeary’s. Although the place had a relatively small menu on the day we went, focused on burgers, sandwiches and appetizers, the quality was excellent. I had a “black and blue” burger, topped with a liberal amount of blue cheese.
The rest of Monday was quiet.
I got up bright and early on Tuesday so I could have breakfast at the hotel before heading over to the Albany Capital Center for Day 1 of the summit. The hotel had a selection of breads, fruit, cereal, a waffle maker and some other breakfast favorites.
Around 8:30 am I, along with most of the delegation from Niagara County, arrived at the center to check in, grab our badges and check our coats. After that we set up our poster that we would present during the two poster presentation sessions during the summit (held between 3:15-4:45 on Tuesday, and 8-9 on Wednesday).
The summit began in earnest shortly after 9:15 on Tuesday. After a brief introduction, we jumped straight into a plenary session, hosted by Pauline Hoffmann. This session focused on the concept of infodemics (referring to the pandemic of disinformation) and how to identify and combat against disinformation.
In this, several key points were mentioned:
Information (both “good” and “bad” information) is everywhere, and in addition, the spread of it and become easier as time as time has gone on - starting from word of mouth (disinformation started when we discovered lying) to modern techniques such as computers, social media, and even artificial intelligence (AI).
There is a difference between disinformation and misinformation, which is based on intent (disinformation involves knowingly sharing false information with the intention to harm or to profit off of it, whereas misinformation is when false information is shared without any intention to harm).
A discussion of why people believe in things (various biases, echo chambers, etc.) and types of disinformation.
A list of red flags was mentioned, as well as of list of tactics used to spread the information.
At the end of the session a list of resources were mentioned, chief among these was a website called AllSides and an upcoming book called Fake News, Witch Hunts and Conspiracy Theories: An Infodemiologist’s Guide to the Truth1.
After the conclusion of the plenary session, the people in attendance split into separate rooms based on the region they represent for regional meetings. The Western regional meeting (Niagara County is in the Western region for the purposes of this summit) focused on networking with the fellows in the region. I managed to communicate to a few of them: one in Erie, and one in Cattagarus County. A handout was provided to help facilitate discussion.
After the regional meetings came a lunch break, followed by a breakout session, in which there were a total of 6 parallel sessions. There were no sessions directly relating to disabilities or people with access and functional needs, so this made my choice of session a bit harder. I ended up going to a session hosted by the Oswego Couty Health Department which talked about addressing community priorites beyond COVID-19. In particular mental health and opioid overdose prevention was emphasized, however, other areas were important, as according to a survey that the county ran, such as cancer and weight management.
The county did run some analysis on the data collected, and noted that people with income below $60000 were more likely to identify as having a chronic condition.
After going through the findings in the data, the presentation proceeded to go over some steps that it has taken to address mental health and the opioid crisis. Overall, the presentaion was very informative. The department also passed out some handouts of some of their programs.
The breakout session was followed by a poster presentation session which lasted one and a half hours. A number of persons visited our poster, which focused on some of the findings from the community engagement survey that the Niagara County Health Department ran in the summer.2
The poster session bookended day 1 of the summit. Afterward several of the fellows and I grabbed a bite to eat at The City Beer Hall, a gastropub. The beer hall had some lighter fare like sandwiches and soup, but also had larger, more expensive plates, including a 14 ounce ribeye steak. I went with a fried chicken sandwich along with a side of fries. That was delicious.3
I explored the city on foot after dinner, taking a look at some of the sights that downtown Albany had to offer, including the State Capitol, the Empire State Plaza, the Egg, and a good portion of Lark Street, before making my way back to the hotel with my hands numb4 from the cold.
Day 2 at the summit started with another poster session. This proved to be less popular than the first day poster session, for two reasons; one, there was a breakfast being served upstairs, and two, a lot of people were checking out of their hotel.
The next session was a plenary session regarding incorporating social determinants of health into public health strategies, hosted by Melissa Fox. There was a short activity done during this where each person at the table had a scenario card and we filled out a wall of bricks when we identified something on the card which is a sign of a poorer health outcome.
From here the speaker went into the reasons why addressing these are important within public health, as well as the steps needed to implement these changes in practice5. An emphasis was made to avoid “performative” collaboration, which destroys trust, a valuable resource in this realm, and instead focus on “symphonic care delivery”, where various stakeholders work together to solve problems. This involves building relationships with various stakeholders, which in my time working with the department is tricky - a big question, is how do we get the stakeholders of the target community in and be interested in working with us?
This plenary session was followed up by another series of breakout sessions. I attended the session on AI in public health, hosted by Casey McManus. AI is a fairly new technology, however, most people have at least heard of it (in fact, most people have used AI without even knowing about it6. There exists quite a number of barriers regarding implementing AI in a mass scale in public health, including security, privacy, legality, and the cost required to implement this.
The talk focused on a pathway to implement AI within this realm. Some takeaways were observed:
Conversation using this technology needs to start now.
There is interest in trainings and workshops involving AI.
Academia, the government and the public and private sectors can provide guidance in AI’s implementation within public health.
There already exists several tools that can assist with “whetting” our appetite with AI: ChatGPT, Google Bard, Fathom and Otter.ai for transcribing meetings, as well as other niche tools like Goblin Tools.
This breakout session was followed by a lunch and networking period, in which the fellows could interact with some professionals. Around 35 tables had a professional that we could speak to. I managed to interact with Byron Backenson, from the Bureau of Communicable Disease Control and Aletha Sprague, one of the fellowship placement coordinators.
The summit closed with some closing remarks from Johanne Morne who had two important things to add:
For summits and conferences like this, there are two paths: we can shelve what we learned, and treat it just as an event, or we can act on what we learned and put things into action (hence why this post exists).
Always think big - the steps involved may be small.
Overall, this was a very good conference, even if there was a lack of material focusing on the stuff I’m working on, and the timing of the poster sessions was not ideal (I think if they happened around lunch time, or right after lunch, the engagement would be better).
That’s all for now - hopefully in the future I can attend more of these sorts of things and distill what I’ve learned. If you found this interesting, feel free to subscribe so you don’t miss out on future content:
The book is available on preorder on Amazon. I should grab a copy when it comes out.
The actual poster file is on slide 2 of the post linked.
The other fellows had other things: the chicken nuggs were a hit, but the french onion soup was not.
I had ice cream on the mind for a bit as I did in fact pass a Ben and Jerry’s, but with my hands freezing I decided against it. There was a closer place to the hotel that serves ice cream, the Boozy Moo, but I wasn’t really keen on alcoholic ice cream.
Convening, integration, influence and collaboration.
For example, the recommendation function on Spotify or Netflix, or natural language models.