Reflection #6: F  inancial Management:

This was a very interesting series, especially since each group has such diverse financial management topics concerning their clients. After listening to each group, I think our group had probably the easiest deliverable of the bunch. 

This was probably the best week for this to happen with our group, as I think every one of us had large finals and papers due the week we had our financial management deliverable due. Because of this, I don’t think we worked as cohesively as a team as we have in the past and you could really tell that the stress of the semester was getting to us due to the increased amount of bickering between us.

In the end I think we delivered a fine product with the necessary amount of background research and commitment it takes to make a budget. It would have been nice to be able to have the experience of expanding the budget out a few years in order to work on creating costs that include inflation, being able to do research on inflation and in order for us to understand a bit more about what goes into a multi-year budget. I think it would also have made the assignment a bit more challenging as many of us have had experience making budgets before.

In conclusion, this was a fantastic course; I think I have learned more skills in this class as I have throughout the rest of my MPH.

 Reflection #5: Quality Improvement  

Yet again, I found this class amazingly beneficial. I thought the speaker was great; very engaging and knowledgeable and the content was something I could definitely see myself using in the future. 

Something that was hugely beneficial to the Springboks was the midterm review of the group. Although we had been working very well in our group, the productivity of our meetings and roll allocation was definitely something that needed to be improved upon.

While I believe we still had quality deliverables before, actually sitting down and talking out different ways of improving our performance and highlighting areas where annoyances have been arising has really helped us to improve the craziness of what was once our process for getting these deliverables done.

We have decided that we would break each section up for smaller groups to work on. This way it is a type of double checking ideas, editing while we go, and being sure that thoughts and context is within the scope of more than one person. We have also decided to add another editor on to the end of the week since two sets of eyes is better than one and there doesn’t have to be a final all eyes on the document session, unless someone really wants to.

Another thing I think was beneficial to the Springboks was doling out the presentation portion of the assignment the week prior too. Before the midterm review, the group would get together prior to class and make up a presentation before heading to class. Something that seemed to be ok in terms of the final project, but was a cause of a lot of stress for all of us due to the last minute running around and creating a presentation that was fit for the high caliber class.

Something that we didn’t talk about in the midterm review but something that I think would have been very helpful was to take a quick survey on the amount of work everyone had to do for the week that the deliverables are due before assigning tasks to members of the group. Some of the members last week started getting frustrated with other members because they weren’t putting much effort into their tasks for the week, this was mainly due to the fact that they had too much work due for that week but never mentioned anything about it to the group. This frustration could have been avoided had there been more dialogue between members when assigning tasks. This week we will try to gauge the amount of work everyone has before allocating tasks- although with most of us being in Wolffy’s other class and proposals being due next week, the stress levels will likely still be very high for some of us.

Reflection #4: M-Health

This was a Great series! I was very impresse

d with all that can be done with smart phones and other simple technology that we use in our everyday life. I’ve always known that our cell phones are incredibly useful but I had no idea how useful they could actually be in our careers. I thought the m-health challenge and the creation of each of our team’s deliverables were very well thought out and very well prepared.

Some thoughts taken from the presentations this week and talking with our group. These additions will help us to get a more realistic understanding of what companies and projects require and will help us improve these skills:

• Include pictures and try out new tools when showcasing our deliverables.
• Think about including an M&E aspect of each of our deliverables.
• Timeline of implementation- a couple of the teams have presented timelines within their deliverables, and it added a more realistic touch and will help us to start gauging the actual time that these projects will take.

In terms of the overall process of the Springboks, we haven’t been able to put in as much time as we would’ve liked to work on our presentations since we all have such different schedules. We basically give ourselves no more than two hours to work on our presentations and to put the final touches on the deliverables since the only times we can meet is the Thursday before to talk with Bill and then 2 hours before class. Although I think our presentations are great and come off well, the stress put on us working up to the presentations prior to class is unnecessary. Not to mention, if we came in second with our m-health sales pitch after spending 90 minutes on the presentation and PowerPoint, what we could accomplish if we had more time.

We spoke as a team and talked about how useful we would find it to get feedback on our deliverables: how the writing sounded, the overall readability, the deliverables, and potential other directions we could have taken them. I think this last one can sometimes be covered in class, but it would be interesting to get feedback from the professors and how they saw the deliverables being executed.

Reflection # 3: Drug Management

I used to think managing a pharmacy in a developing country would be  something challenging but very interesting and beneficial, now after the work we have done in this Drug Management class series, I can see that it wi ll be something very challenging and beneficial but I can honestly say that it is something I am not going to thoroughly enjoy when it crosses my path in the future. There is something about it that made me cringe whenever I sat down to do work on this class series. I think just the thought of there being a million little things that need to be dealt with and thought about makes me nervous that I will forget a small, but very important, portion of the drug maintenance.

The work we did in our groups has been helpful to clam those nerves as the activity was designed to show us the different steps necessary to fulfill the needs of a clinic’s pharmacy, and with this practice, point out areas that have been overlooked and / or done incorrectly.

During the presentations of other groups work on Tuesday, what was so clear in our heads and groups to explain about a topic we knew so well, became something completely different in what our “spokespeople” saw and understood. Even though we might have spent hours on the project, what we thought was a great run down and very concise, in actuality, it was clear that it might not actually be and there could have been some very clear miss steps in how the deliverables were interpreted that you could only tell when someone else was sent to critique/ present your work. We have been told this for years in school about getting papers reviewed by another set of eyes, but this reiterated it in a real context.

Reflection 2: HR 

This past series is the first time I have ever learned about HR activities within an educational setting. I have had experience in writing job descriptions and interviewing in my past job however, the positions I was writing and interviewing for were for internships and entry level jobs so I have not had any experience in creating descriptions and HR requirements for higher level positions.

I thought the activity of creating a job description and the advertising for a Clinical Director position was really great. Compared to the work plan assignment, it was much more manageable in terms of what the deliverables entailed within the course of a week but still was something that I can see being used later in life. I never would have thought about learning the HR side of my future career, nor the idea of needing to advertise for job openings.

I have been very impressed with the work done by each group and love hearing about each project- while being engaged as a “client”. Although  it was great the first presentation day to hear from each of the groups on their individual work plans, it got to be rather repetitive, so I think last week’s style of presenting was much more manageable and kept everyone in the audience engaged.

So far I have been very impressed with the class and everything that we have done thus far. I really appreciate that the activities are actual ones we will most likely implement in our future jobs. Other classes seem to have projects and papers due just to make sure we complete enough work to equal the number of credits we are getting for it, whereas these activities are put into the context of situations we are likely to see in the field. I believe class times are utilized very well with the way the series are broken up into one lecture/ activity class time and the other is focused on what the students have learned in the past 2 weeks and to discuss our process and the difficulties we found while doing so.

Reflection 1: Work Plans

I have had very little experience with w ork plans in  the past, or at least creating work plans for an entire grant. My past experience includes weekly work plans during my internship with KMET in Kisumu, Kenya. These however, were basic overviews of what my week ahead looked like in order for the administration to accurately book transportation and ensure that as an int ern, I was doing beneficial work for the organisation and for my career.

In my past career in advertising, we followed timelines and deadline dates - not as extensive workplan as was done with the grant proposal. I believe apart of this was due to the fact that each campaign that was  created followed a similar outline as the one before. 

The work plan activitiy given to each group was very helpful in a couple ways:

1) It showed each of us how not to write grant proposals. The proposals we were writing work plans for were all over the place and they gave us examples of things to be sure not to do when we write grants in the future.

2)The activity gave us an understanding of what we will most likely be doing in our future careers, if not to write the proposal itself but at least learn how to write a work plan from having no previous knowledge of a project and to show us it could actually be done and done well.  

The activity took more time than anyone thought that it would, the biggest time suck of it was the understanding of the proposal itself and breaking it up into manageable pieces. It took us a while to discuss the objectives and outcomes of the proposal with the group to actually understand where the grant writers were coming from. 

All in all, even after all the time it took us to create a manageable/explainable piece of work, it was very beneficial to get experience in understanding grant proposals and writing work plans for new projects.