Cradle Cincinnati

Callyn Samuel, Summer 2019

For my summer internship, I worked alongside Cradle Cincinnati's communications team leader Jessica Seeberger. She presented me with many projects that were the most pressing for Cradle's cause. These projects involved data retrieval and presentation for infant deaths in Hamilton County and social media outreach for community information. Data processing involved sifting through the infant deaths occurring from 2012-now to determine if cause of deaths were sleep related and compiling them in to one location where they could be presented to the connections team to see who was previously enrolled in our program, what hospitals the death occurred at, and other demographic information. Social media outreach involved meetings to discuss how to present pertinent information to the community as well as sharing community events that all have a goal of decreasing preventable infant deaths both directly through safe sleep and indirectly through things like stress, access to health care, and more. I also worked with many other members of the cradle Cincinnati team to complete projects such as qualitative data gathering by creating and distributing a survey to community members to be compiled and shared with the Learning collaborative for quality improvement. I helped to integrate new Tobacco treatment specialists into the UC women's health clinic which involved meetings with many people on the team to brainstorm ways to improve the workflow between the healthcare professionals involved in the clinic. Outside of major projects I also helped to supplement other team members with their endeavors. I taught safe sleep classes at Cincinnati health department twice a week and attended many team meetings and events to help integrate myself into the community. Overall the experience was rewarding as I was able to learn an incredible amount of information regarding Hamilton county's infant mortality rate and how our goal of reaching or surpassing the national average can be achieved. I enjoyed the transparency of Cradle's agenda as it caters to black women and the role of healthcare professionals in making sure that both women and their babies are taken care of properly despite racial bias being a huge factor in poor birth outcomes for black women. I had unique opportunities to shadow in both neonatology and obgyn which was an incredible experience that has influenced my future career decisions in a positive way. With such a large team there was often a lot to do, but also could be overwhelming at times. Working at Cradle taught me to balance my responsibilities well and be more independent in my own endeavors in order to get my best work done most efficiently. I enjoyed the camaraderie between team members and often attended racial equity meetings and team meetings that discussed social, racial, and work dynamics. This created an air of respect in the team that I am privileged to witness as it not only taught me how best to approach teamwork in my future career but also the value of seeing change being implemented in the real world no matter how small it begins.

Download Callyn's poster (.pptx)