Jessica Hooke visits SPH’s booth at the 2024 American Public Health Association Annual Meeting & Expo in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

community health

Online MPH Student Gives Voice to Adults with Brain Injuries

Jessica Hooke, a seasoned speech-language pathologist, pairs her clinical expertise in the rehabilitation of patients after brain injury with her ongoing training in public health to develop and implement prevention, recovery, and community re-integration initiatives.

Like many of her peers in the Online MPH program, Jessica Hooke sees public health as key to leveling up the work she is already deeply engaged in.

Hooke was in high school when she decided she wanted to become a speech-language pathologist (SLP). She recalls shadowing a therapy session between an SLP and a young patient with a brain tumor who was trying to return to college. Hooke realized then that she wanted to spend her career helping people rebuild their lives after sickness or injury.

After earning her bachelor’s degree in speech-language and hearing sciences from the University of Minnesota and then her master’s in communicative sciences and disorders from Hampton University, Hooke has spent the last 16 years immersed in the field of speech-language pathology. She assesses patients for speech, language, cognition, voice, and swallowing challenges and counsels patients and their families on coping with communication and swallowing disorders.

While Hooke has worked with patients from as young as a few months to centenarians, she found her niche among adults with neurological disorders and neurogenic communication disorders, conditions that typically arise from strokes, traumatic brain injuries, brain tumors, or progressive neurological conditions like Parkinson’s disease and multiple sclerosis. She has even cared and advocated for members of her own family who were facing similar circumstances.

Eventually though, Hooke says she was no longer satisfied simply aiding patients in the aftermath of tragedy. She remembers a young stroke survivor, likely in her 30s at the time, who came out of acute care to start rehabilitation. The patient told Hooke, “I wish I had known to take my medication.” She had learned that strokes are often preventable and controlling high blood pressure is one of the most important steps a person can take to reduce their risk—only it was too late for her. Witnessing this revelation time and again, Hooke felt compelled to become more involved in the community, beyond the walls of the hospital. She wanted to promote health education and prevention—in other words, public health.

“I can’t go back. When your eyes are open, your eyes are open. It is hard to see and not do, for me at least,” says Hooke, who received a Heart of Orlando award at the American Heart Association’s 2023 Orlando Heart Ball for her advocacy in the community, and was selected to join the national American Stroke Association Advisory Committee in 2023. “I had the clinical expertise. I know about the diagnosis and the population from a medical standpoint and rehab standpoint, but connecting the dots on how we disseminate this information, all of that came together while I was picking things up from my MPH program.”

Hooke discussed her experience in the online MPH program so far and what she credits with being the real-world applications of her education.

Where do you think your passion for public health stems from?

I have always had a desire to help people. That is number one. When I was in college, I spent about three months in South Africa working with children with AIDS and HIV and then later, working with adults during another short trip after I became a speech-language pathologist. I love speech and working with adults with acquired brain injuries. The goal going into this public health degree was to figure out how to communicate better with the community that I serve, and how to connect those dots so that they understand and so that things are done more effectively—whether it be programs or initiatives or public health announcements. How do I make it smoother for individuals to live out these realities after an injury? And how do we prevent these injuries from happening?

What does your work as a clinical rehabilitation specialist look like?

I am still a frontline [healthcare] worker, so I still treat patients. I work within a large hospital system, Orlando Health. We have the only level one trauma center within central Florida, Orlando Regional Medical Center, so we get the most severe individuals when it comes to trauma. I was our brain injury program’s clinical specialist for eight years [and] I just transitioned to work primarily on community programs. I have a few grants involving work with the community. One is making restaurants more accessible to individuals with acquired brain injuries. That looks at many different aspects from [accommodating] individuals who may have lost the ability to read and cannot read a menu anymore, to providing options for different diets, to accessibility education for the restaurant team members. I am particularly passionate about non-visible injuries as a speech pathologist. I created medical alert books for survivors to use with first responders, for example, and I provided education to EMTs, police officers, and fire departments to understand this population better.

A lot of what I do is education, but also, the implementation of programs for this population. Another thing I do is look at the social determinants of health. What does food security look like in this population? Mental health? I have collaborated with a lot of different departments on that. My work involves listening to patients and their caregivers to figure out how to provide frontline services. Then, the other aspect of what I do is working with the community. We bring [former patients] back for reunions, administer surveys to see what their needs are, and invite them to be part of our patient family advisory council. So again, a lot of [garnering] feedback on where people are right now and then trying to look at data—what areas of town are impacted the most? And then taking that to create, whether it be an event or with another community partner, some kind of initiative.

Do you often apply what you are learning in the Online MPH program to your professional work?

Oh, all the time. Every step of what I do in this program has applied to not even just [my] work but [to me] personally. I was in a process of writing a grant during [module] one which focused on setting goals and objectives, and what I had to do for the grant was exactly what we were doing in school. I have started to question what is the value [of these programs] for the community partner versus the value just for me? That really transformed how I reached out to organizations to partner on grants: how I approached them, what the incentive was for them, and how I was going to respect who they were, what they were doing, and show that I valued them. Sometimes we just do what we do and do not think, “Okay, let me take a step back. I am asking, asking, asking—what am I giving?” How do I expect a local restaurant owner, who’s struggling themselves in the midst of all the things going on, to partner with me?

I am also now thinking about how do I collect data effectively? I am working with a restaurant and trying to figure out how I am going to collect data differently than before, because I have done surveys, and I have realized you can never get people to do them, and you do not get a real great answer. Now, I am starting to think, “Okay, how do I get an interview? How do I get a focus group? How can I expand on that?” So, [my education] definitely has helped me in those ways.

I will say personally too, it has helped me to care for myself better. It has given me a better perspective of things going on. Things like climate change, which is what we are [studying] right now. It was right during Hurricane Milton that we were doing a huge project [on climate change] and it really made me pause. It connected the dots for me on what I can do, even my personal life, to help slow down that progression of where we are going with climate change. And health-wise, for me, it really put the alarms on [about] allostatic load, stress and what does that look like for me? What do I need to do to change my own lifestyle so I am not causing harm to myself.

What do you do in your free time for yourself to balance your career serving others?

I am a runner. I did a marathon in 2019 and 2020, back-to-back, but I had an injury before my first one and then with COVID, things started to go down downhill. I had a lot of health concerns over the last year, and I realized I had to do something, so I started [running] again this year, which has been my time to decompress. I also love listening to music and going to concerts, genealogy, painting, and reading.

What led you to choose SPH’s online MPH program?

I was accepted to another school prior to applying to BU and I was going to go that route, [but] a lot of things happened that made me question if that was the right school for me. BU came up and I decided to take a risk to apply. One of the things that stood out during that process was the communication that I received [from BU] was night and day, particularly from Moe [Mahogany Price, director of student success for the online MPH program]. We had a Facebook page where an individual from the cohort asked, “Why are you doing this program?” There were tons of responses and what encouraged me was that there were people like me who were in different fields. That was a huge plus for me. [We] became a community of like-minded people who had a desire to use public health in a positive way to impact the places [we] were in.

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