Week 1: The Organization and its Mission

Week 1 – The Organization and Its Mission

I intern in the Quantitative Health Sciences department in Umass Medical School located in the Albert Sherman Center at 368 Plantation Street, Worcester MA 01605 which can be reached at (508) 856-8999 or at http://www.umassmed.edu/qhs/about/index.aspx. As an intern for the video part of this department, I am supervised by German Chiriboga who is a research coordinator of the QHS department who can be reached at 508-856-8977 or at german.chiriboga@umassmed.edu. Ever since its inception in 2009, the goals of the QHS department have been to improve the health of the individual and population health by transforming health care delivery and be recognized for translational research. This department strives to not only fulfill the scientific needs of the medical center and be the innovator of medical and translational research, but it also trains future medical workers to try and fulfill this vision. As of October 2013, the QHS department has 36 primary faculty and 29 secondary faculty members on board and strives to have 40 primary faculty members by the fall of 2015. I think this is a really beneficial department for any student in the medical school that has their own vision of improving medical care through research. Reading the history and goals from the QHS website makes it clear that the video section of the department (where I intern) is just as important as any of the classes, lessons, presentations, scholarly articles or any of the things that contribute to research in the QHS department. The videos that I work with contain regular people being interviewed about their own health issues. The finished product goes into a DVD that goes up for reviewing before being distributed to the public. I feel like I am part of something important because I am helping with providing a visual type of information that is from a first-person’s point of view that can help medical researchers fulfill their goals.