After a semester of hard work, La Follette School certificate students enrolled in PA 360: Workshop in Health Policy presented their final projects in the spring, covering policy-centric topics including lead poisoning prevention, rental housing, water contamination, and Medicaid.
The class, taught by La Follette instructor and director of experiential learning Mary Michaud, is designed to help health policy certificate students develop analytical and research skills while working with a team on an applied project by a client organization working in health policy.
“I like how people in my certificate classes are doing so many different things and are from so many different majors,” says Caroline Gauthier, a recent graduate who earned certificates in health policy and public policy in addition to a bachelor’s degree in economics. With family members who work in public health, Gauthier became interested in the health policy certificate after taking a healthcare economics class. She is interested in attending law school and eventually working in healthcare law and financing.
In May, Gauthier’s team presented their final project on how the COVID-19 pandemic affected state administrative burdens in Medicaid and SNAP benefits. Their client, Ideas 42, will use the database the team created, tracking changes to evaluate whether child poverty has increased due to the pandemic. Members of the client team said that the insights from the project will better help them frame the issue and the solution and is a great step in a field that is under analyzed.
Gauthier’s teammate Suvir Grover is a genetics and economics major pursuing a health policy certificate, who plans to attend graduate school to study data analytics. “I have seen the mass impact that data has on the research side of many subjects, and I believe that it is an important skill to learn,” Grover says. “I would like to eventually pair that learning with working in the sector of health or economic policy.”
Another group spent their semester building a policy analysis project for the Wisconsin Bureau of Environmental and Occupational Health. They aimed to identify potential revenue streams to cover the costs incurred by local health departments in childhood lead screening. Mariel Trujillo worked alongside her team to identify and analyze two policy options to produce this funding, insights that the client found to be thorough and balanced and offered them two avenues of funding that had not been considered before.
Trujillo is a biology student involved in the Biocore Honors program and is an undergraduate researcher at UW, complimenting her investigations into social systems and their effects on individuals’ well-being in her health policy certificate courses. She hopes to work in clinical research after graduation and begin medical school the following year. “[Trujillo’s] careful listening and observational skills, respect for others, deep critical thinking, and tenacity, coupled with a most excellent sense of humor and a calm, understanding presence, will make her an excellent physician,” says Michaud.
The client organizations that worked with the class teams will use the information found in the thorough reports to inform their further actions. “The student-led health policy analysis and report on financing of childhood lead poisoning prevention has been a valuable resource to support my internal policy efforts,” said one client from the Wisconsin Department of Health Services. “This information supported strategic discussions with DHS public health and Medicaid staff on CLP funding.”
“To see everything the students put into these projects is inspiring,” Michaud says.
The La Follette School saw a record number of certificate graduates in 2024.
– Story by Clare Brogan