Toney ’28 | St. Joseph County Health Dept.

This summer, I interned at the St. Joseph County Department of Health in South Bend, Indiana. I was lucky enough to work with a fellow classmate, Benny Torres ’28. This internship allowed us to see public health from a variety of perspectives, as we shadowed nearly every unit of the department of health. During the shadowing, we could venture into the community with Community Health Workers, inspect pools and restaurants with the department’s robust team of inspectors, or learn about the financial and business management side behind the department.

Another aspect from this internship was the privilege to join students from the University of Notre Dame for dialectic lectures and volunteer work in the community. During these lectures, we discussed social determinants of health, including topics surrounding race, poverty, neighborhood, environment, and more. We also had the chance to travel to Chicago with the Notre Dame students to visit different organizations that are attempting to provide an equitable health outcome to their community members.

Shadowing Wabash physicians was another great part of this internship. Through my shadowing of Dr. Robert Oppman, Dr. Daniel Brier, Dr. Robert Cassady, Dr. Curt Gongwer,and Dr. Cam Gongwer, I was able to see a wide variety of patients, ranging from kids only a few weeks old to patients in their 70s and 80s.

In addition, Benny and I had a project that we collaborated on throughout the course of the internship that focused on HPV vaccination rates in Saint Joseph County. The department gave us a great deal of independence when it came to this project, and we explored many creative avenues to help increase the HPV coverage rate in St. Joseph County. We created both flyers and social media videos advertising the benefits of the vaccine for short-term eKorts, and we completed a demographic analysis of St. Joseph County to better understand which areas were in the most need for mobile clinics to improve the coverage rate long term.

Lastly, I would like to thank all the wonderful people in South Bend who made this possible, including but not limited to Ashley Helman, RN, Mike Wruble, MBA, Dr. Michelle Migliore, Dr. Joe Kotva, the SJC DoH Nursing Unit, and Dr. Sam Milligan. I thoroughly enjoyed my time working in Saint Joseph County this summer, and I am thankful for the experience.