2017 FL-DSSG Summer Internship

The Mayo Clinic is a large hospital group that serves over a million individuals from across the nation and 137 countries worldwide. In 1986, Mayo Clinic opened its doors in Jacksonville and has a 300-bed hospital and over 40 medical and surgical specialties. The Mayo Clinic Jacksonville, launched Wellness Rx in response to the 2016 Community Health Needs Assessment report regarding health disparities in the community. The first phase of the Wellness Rx program is a collaboration with New Town Success Zone and focuses on the New Town neighborhood adjacent to the Edward Waters College in Duval County. This community is one neighborhood identified by the Florida Department of Health-Duval County as Health Zone 1, a community at risk for the challenged health indicators.

The program consists of health and wellness education and screening. The initiative faces two wicked problems. First, there are no community level data available to help with identification and selection of at-risk neighborhoods to ensure the most optimal use of health resources. Second, the program currently is working in an area that already receives services from many other agencies and may be experiencing saturation of services. The goal of the 2017 DSSG project is to assist the Wellness Rx, and similar organizations in the area, decide which specific neighborhoods in Duval and St. Johns County would serve as areas for focused health resources in future initiatives. Using Census Data provided by the Florida Department of Health, the DSSG program will create “hot spot” maps that can be used to determine areas that are of highest need for resources. The team will be looking at targeted health outcomes (diabetes, stroke, and heart disease, along with other health risk factors (e.g., demographic information, environmental factors) to create a health risk index score by Census Tract. With this project, we will be creating a neighborhood profile that highlights areas in Duval and St. Johns County that are in most need of health services. The resulting process can be used by organizations around Jacksonville to provide an empirical way to determine where to focus their healthcare resources to have the greatest impact on health outcomes. By targeting high risk health neighborhoods, health care organizations can achieve their greatest impact and efficient use of resources.

Mayo Clinic Community Engagement Website

Yoga 4 Change is a non-profit organization that achieves meaningful change for veterans, incarcerated individuals, vulnerable youth, and those dealing with substance abuse. Their purpose-driven yoga program has the vision to heal and empower these underserved populations, creating healthier, safer communities, one class at a time. Yoga 4 Change contracts with highly qualified teachers who teach yoga classes at different local facilities to help individuals who are dealing with trauma and other stress disorders. The wicked problem facing Yoga 4 Change is the mental and physical health of the community. Those who are victims of violence and abuse are more likely to become violent in the future. Recent research has indicated that meditative practices such as yoga can increase mindfulness, reduce stress, improve empathy, and lead to self-compassion. One way for Yoga 4 Change to achieve their mission of helping individuals overcome stress and past trauma, is to organize their data in the best way that provides for coordination of services and thus can be represented to potential donors and stakeholders. Better management and use of their data would improve their organization and spread awareness about their program to other groups who might utilize their services to assist people in need of physical and mental health. The goal of the 2017 DSSG project is to help Yoga 4 Change organize their data and provide reports to support them in critical program decisions. This includes finding out which groups show the most benefit from specific aspects of the yoga curricula. Since 2016, Yoga 4 Change started giving self-assessments for stress and mood levels to students in their classes before and after each session. Since 2017, Yoga 4 Change partnered with Head Start to collect students' blood pressure as well as their heart rate data. This data will be used to determine how these classes are useful to individuals in their personal and/or professional life. With better organization and use of their existing data, Yoga 4 Change will be better equipped to empower their students, helping them overcome trauma or stress on an individual basis and fulfill the organization’s mission of creating healthier and safer communities.

Yoga 4 Change Website