Sonja Williams Presents at OHM National Leadership Summit

Yesterday, we wrote that it’s always a pleasure to highlight a faculty member who is doing something interesting—well, the same rings true for highlighting students doing the same.

On Friday, February 27, 2nd year MPH student Sonja Williams gave a presentation entitled “Washington Adventist Hospital: Helping Others Breath Better” at the Office of Minority Health’s National Leadership Summit.

In her own words, she describes how she came to present at the conference and the experience of discussing her research before an audience of esteemed experts in Public Health.

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At the end of last year, the opportunity availed itself for me to submit an abstract to the Office of Minority Health’s National Leadership Summit Abstract Call. With help from my advisor Dr. Carter-Pokras, we submitted an abstract detailing a collaborative project we did with the Center on Health Disparities at Adventist Health Care, Latino Health Initiative, and Clinicians for the Underserved. Together, we created a culturally competent asthma guideline training for Emergency Department (ED) staff at Washington Adventist Hospital.

The idea originated from the concerns raised by the Latino Health Initiative’s Asthma Management Program. Through this program, LHI was able to enhance asthma management skills in Latino youth and their parents in Montgomery Count—but they were discovering that there was a lack of appropriate communication between physicians and their participants. This discovery led to collaboration with our group and the design of this culturally-competent asthma guideline continuing education class to combat this problem in communication.

Although we submitted an abstract for the Summit last year, we did not find out that I would be able to present until very late. We only had a week to prepare the whole presentation and that made this ordeal very stressful. It was an enjoyable experience now looking back a couple days later—but going through it was rough!

As soon as we heard that I was going to present Dr. Carter-Pokras, and I went right into drafting a presentation. I thought I would go crazy with all the revisions and preparation that had to go into actually getting this presentation ready for the conference.

When I first found out I didn’t really have time to react. I just started pulling information together from a poster I did for our school’s Student Interaction Day, but as we got closer to the big day I began to get nervous. It began to sink in that I would be before an audience of people who probably had much more experience than me in the public health field and it began to get to me!

As I practiced at home trying to get my timing down, I started to really think about all the “what ifs.” What if I don’t say this right? What if I forget a key point? What if I miss some important fact about the intervention? What If I can’t answer the questions the audience may pose after the presentation? It began to get a little scary. I revised the slides and practiced up until the day before working to make sure that I “own” my slides and would be comfortable with the topic. I practiced in front of a mirror, in front of friends and in front of Dr. Carter-Pokras.

After all that practice I did begin to feel better about my presentation but I still had to pray my nerves away though! By the way, practicing in front of the mirror is a weird experience in and of itself! Try talking to yourself in the mirror and looking right into your own eyes. Very unnerving!

The day of my presentation I got there early and enjoyed the plenary discussion beforehand. I met with some of the collaborators in our project, Marcos Pesquera and Dr. Marilyn Lynk of the Center on Health Disparities, and they helped me calm down a little. My presentation was at 1 p.m. and I went to the assigned room around 12:30. At that time I got to meet the moderator of the talk and she reassured me that I would do fine. I guess she could see the nervousness on my face.

Before the presentation time started, I sat down and reflected on just how significant this moment was. I was about to speak in front of almost 50 people at a National Conference and I am only a MPH student. I don’t have a long list of degrees behind my name yet and I definitely don’t have the experience my fellow panelists had in this topic—but I was still given this opportunity! It was a very humbling experience and I had to give a quick prayer of praise to God before the panel started.

When it was time to start the moderator invited us up to the panel and I walked slowly to my seat. It was a pretty formal panel session with the moderator introducing each of the panelists and each panelist having twenty minutes to present. The floor was opened up for questions after our moderator gave concluding remarks.

I was the last of three to speak, so I got to sit and listen to all the great things people were doing in their own communities. One woman was working with HIV positive patients and actually saw increases in the health of her participants with the interventions her group conducted. Another woman chronicled the journey of her health department and the use of evaluative measures to insure its effectiveness. Then it was my turn.

I took some deep breaths and I began. My presentation was a description of the design, implementation, and evaluation of the preliminary results from our knowledge assessment and evaluation. We don’t know if this project has actually helped others breathe better yet because those outcome data have not been analyzed but we do know that our training did improve the knowledge base of the ED staff who participated.

When I was finished our moderator culminated the discussion and opened it up to questions. I didn’t get many questions but I was able to speak to the importance of Community Based Participatory Research and how using this method of research helps truly do the research our community needs.

When it was finally over I felt totally relieved and relaxed! I actually spoke before professional members of the public health field!!! I felt very proud of myself and excited because the stress was over and I didn’t embarrass myself or run out of the room in the middle of my speech! I don’t have any concrete plans but when we analyze the emergency room data at WAH I would love to report on the trends we find. We hope that our training actually helped to decrease repeat visits and I would love report that!

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Sonja Williams is a second year MPH student studied Epidemiology in the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics. Thanks to Sonja for sharing her experience speaking at the OMH National Leadership Summit Presentation on February 27, 2009.