I´m Doctor Bob Walsh, and I am the chair of the department of Community Health. In Community Health, we have three different degrees. One in Health Care Administration and this is where people would train to be hospital administrator or to provide valuable administrative services perhaps in a nursing home or in a doctor´s clinic or some other facet of the ever-growing medical community. We also have a degree in Community or Public Health and this is where people would train to work in a public health district or provide some other valuable service in a public health setting. The third one is in teaching school health and this is a certification process where you certify through the department of education here and then you certify again to teach in a high school classroom.

The area of health is obviously growing. There are a myriad of jobs. We have a very high job placement rate, and again this is a very competitive field, particularly health care administration, but for those students that desiring to provide their skills and talent in an administrative setting, then the Health Service Administration degree is the way to go.

One of the things, I think, that makes the department of Community Health the strong cohesive faculty that it is, is every one of our members is actually done for a living what they´re teaching. I spent eighteen years in public health. We have other faculty members who have taught school and their primarily responsible for the School Health degree. We have faculty who have worked in other facets of Community Health, and I think any time you actually done what it is you are instructing students in, I think that brings a lot of background and a lot of experience, and I think ultimately this pays dividends in the education opportunities for the students. We have a very active internship program where people, again, majoring in Community Health or Health Service Administration spend a semester working in an actual site. This is a non-paid, but it is a credit opportunity and, again, when they come out of this kind of pre-training program, an incredibly high numbers of them are offered jobs right there from the internship site. And I think this, again, bridges the gap between the academic experience and the reality of actually doing this in the world. This is a brand new program. A year ago, right now, we had an associate´s degree and less than twenty-five, thirty students; we now are pushing up over two-hundred students, and so in this first year we´ve experienced incredible growth. And that´s been exciting, but it has also presented a lot of challenges. One of the things, too, that we do that many of our students are interested in, is every summer we take students to various foreign countries. Ghana Africa has been the most popular site, and we go over and we perform a variety of Community and Public Health services and tasks. We worked on dietary surveys and tried to increase the dietary intake, caloric intake, among the people in Ghana. We´ve also done some Aids work in terms of HIV positive individuals. We´ve tried to provide services, tried to provide some data gathering strategies for the government to use as they grapple with this very serious situation.

We have many outstanding faculty members in our department. Reba Keele has spent many many years in the health services administration area. She also has a long academic career with a myriad of successes. Vance Hillman is also a registered nurse. He has worked in the public health setting utilizing his nursing degree as well as his PhD in Health Education. Brian Barthel has worked in a public health department in the Department of Health Education. He has accompanied Lynley on some of her Ghana African travels. Lynley Rowan has an arm-full of successes. She has taught school. She has worked in the public health department. She takes groups of students, again, regularly to different various foreign countries. She, herself, travels two to three times a year generally funded by either a governmental entity or private donors seeking her services in the valuable skills, which she brings to a variety of foreign countries. And again, this is kind of the general tenor of the talent and the abilities that we have in our Community Health department. We also have Lori Richards, and she taught for a number of years. She has been on faculty here for over twenty-five years. She primarily works on our School Health Education degree, a very very accomplished teacher. She also teaches Human Sexuality, which is also in high demand by many of our students, and never a dull moment in that class. And so, again, each one of our faculty brings perhaps a different perspective to the job of Community Health, but every one of them, I feel, more than adequately trains our students to go out and accept a real positions in the world, and we´re trying to give them the skills to bring them immediate success.

Right now one of the very encouraging things that is happening in our Community Health program are the high numbers of students being offered professional positions out of the completion of their internship programs. And typically this is not always the norm, but again we have very very high quality students, we have high quality faculty, and we are encouraging individuals to bridge that gap between the academic setting and the real world. And, I think, the better we encourage that process as part of our academic training programs, the more often they are to be included into the working public health professional setting right from graduation from this institution.

Right now we are struggling trying to find qualified academic faculty. We have two searches occurring right now, and it´s been very very difficult to find people that can teach topics such as epidemiology, diseases, drugs, public health administration; and those are the kinds of classes that we offer, and it is a continuous struggle trying to find qualified faculty.

One of the interesting things, too, that we are doing is part of a departmental project is the assessment protocol for excellence in public health. What we´ve done is we´ve been gathering the demographic data on Utah Valley. We´re looking at births, deaths, we´re looking at divorce rates, disease rates, and job related injuries, the poverty index, and things that are related to the health kind of a data processing. We´re soon going to be organizing a community committee where we will bring in the mayor; we will bring in county officials; we´ll bring in educational officials; and we will be performing a diagnosis on Utah Valley. We then are going to begin to identify some of the major public health issues and problems.

As you are aware, Utah has a fairly substantial rate of driving accidents. The average speed now out on I15 is approaching 80 miles-an-hour. We have a myriad of tailgaters, aggression; those kinds of things occurring on our highways, and, of course, it´s reflected in our high accident rates. We also have issues with the numbers of facilities for school kids, schoolchildren, classroom size; we also have a fairly substantial methamphetamine usage rate in the state of Utah. In fact, we typically vacillate between number one in the nation and number two. And so then, we bring in community leaders together to try to identify "What are the factors in our Utah life style," that predispose us, perhaps, to some of the unique successes and the good things about this state, but also what are some of the more negative and maybe some of the bad things that in fact are occurring. And then, we are going to try to match the community resources with various forms of expertise in the community, and hopefully, we begin as an academic institution to take the lead in trying to solve some of these critical lifestyle living issues in the state of Utah.