Since the COVID-19 pandemic closed K-12 schools across the country in the early months of 2020, determining how to safely keep schools open in the wake of subsequent coronavirus waves without compromising students’ education has been a top priority for many in the public health community. As COVID-19 testing has become widely available across the country, these efforts have been essential in maintaining the health and safety of teachers, staff, and students in schools and beyond.

In Los Angeles, California, Heluna Health’s Reopening K-12 Schools Safely — COVID-19 School Testing Project is just one example of how public health agencies have come together to successfully offer comprehensive COVID-19 testing in schools. The program provides a number of support options for public and private schools across LA County, including operational support through a full-service testing team, financial support, and an allotment of testing kits.

School of Public Health alum Katherine Churchwell (SPH’18) is a project manager for the program. In her role, she oversees outreach, implementation, maintenance, and data collection, as well as fosters relationships between Heluna Health and their project partners and subcontractors, the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health, Primary.Health, VestraCare, and the Public Health Institute.

Churchwell sat down with us to share more about her work, the importance of partnerships in public health practice, and how her time at SPH has prepared her to do the work that she is doing today.

In your role at Heluna Health, you are responsible for maintaining and building relationships with community partners. Can you talk about the importance of partnerships and community in public health work?

Partnerships are essential in public health work because it takes a variation in backgrounds, perspectives, and expertise to put a successful project in place. In a public health project, there are several phases from the onset to completion, so it is essential to partner with people and organizations from different experiences and backgrounds to put all of the pieces together for each phase.

That being said, teamwork is essential when partnering with various sources, as every person and organization has their own processes within their expertise. It is important to both take the time to learn one another’s processes and come together to determine how you can make each partner fit into the parameters of the shared project, which can often take a level of creativity and innovation to make happen.

But ultimately, none of this will be accomplished or successful if there is not a sense of community. This applies on multiple levels. One is understanding the community you are serving, which comes from engaging with the community itself. Another is having a sense of community within the team and partners you are working with, as success in public health work can be hard to achieve without any shared professional trust.  

The pandemic has heightened the need for these kinds of supports to improve health. How has this been reflected in your own work?

Since school personnel are extremely overwhelmed with their day-to-day job and the additional responsibilities that come with working at a school, this project helps to relieve a fracture of additional responsibility as a result of the pandemic.

By providing onsite logistical support and the data management platform where results are automatically uploaded by testing teams, we are limiting the burden of COVID testing for school personnel, as well as providing a space to track and prevent future outbreaks. All of this helps to ensure school administration and personnel are able to continue the day-to-day of school life in as normal of a capacity as possible.   

You have worked on COVID-19 response at a local-level for much of the pandemic. How have you seen attitudes and responses evolve over the last three years? How do you hope we move forward from here and build a resilient future?

At the beginning of the pandemic, there was a lot of fear in the people I would speak to, both in the sphere of public health and the general public. Public health personnel were concerned about being able to do their jobs safely and not get sick themselves, while the general public was both scarred and frustrated by the lack of answers as they feared for themselves, their friends, and their families.

Since then, attitudes and responses have evolved. In my work with other public health professionals, the attitude of fear has evolved into one of thinking quickly and efficiently to problem solve as various situations arise in the sectors we work as it relates to COVID. Within the general public, it seems that the day-to-day burden of having to worry about and follow COVID protocols has caused a significant burden on people’s mental health and they are doing whatever they can to get back to a “new normal.” 

I hope that we can move towards a more resilient future by creating more preventative public health programs at every level (local, state, and federal), instead of reactive ones. For example, this could look like creating more vaccine outreach and advocacy programs to prevent future COVID-19 outbreaks.

What did you enjoy most about your experience at SPH?

I enjoyed the partnership, collaboration, and community that came with the interactions with my fellow classmates. It was great to meet people from so many different backgrounds, perspectives, and cultures yet all be united in our like mindedness and commitment to the public health mission. 

How did your time at SPH prepare you to do the work that you are doing today?

Through both my practicum experience and accompanying class assignments, I learned the steps and phases of developing a project from beginning to end, which has been a useful tool in the work I am doing today. For my practicum, I independently developed a proposal end-to-end for a health equity program. The process of conducting background research on the community I was working in and meeting with local leaders and advocates has informed how I conduct my day-to-day as a project manager in my current public health work.