Evelyn Cruz Interview; Region V (7/14/16)
1.
Identification:
-What
is your name? Evelyn Cruz
-Where
were you born? Puerto Rico
-Where
did you grow up? Puerto Rico; left at age 18
-Profession
currently: Public Health program coordinator; work in the minority health
program at the state of division of public health
-Region
working in right now: Region 5
-State
living in right now: Wisconsin
2.
Why
are you interested in public health and how did you get into the field of
public health?
I was initially working in civil rights
compliance- I had an interest in law, fairness and justice. I focused my work
around Title VI of Civil Rights Act- working with language access issues. I
ended up transitioning to working with minority populations and that lead me to
work with the minority health program; that is how I ended up in public health 12
years ago.
3.
What
is health equity to you?
When
I think about health equity, I think about fairness in health outcomes. And are
you having the same opportunities that other people have to be healthy? Do I
have the same opportunity to be healthy as everybody else?
4.
What
are some challenges (that still persist) within the field of health equity in
public health?
When
I came into the public health field 11 years ago, I noticed that the framework
wasn’t there for social determinants; or it wasn’t well known. I think we have
come a long way in understanding academically how this works now. But we
haven’t really come a long way on how this plays out in the communities.
Also,
how we think about evidence based practice. We work with evidence based
practices, and that is great, but EBP don’t always worry about community context;
and at times context is very important for addressing health disparities. We
still have some way to go for understanding and recognizing Practice-Based-Evidence,
what boots on the ground do to address health disparities. How communities
build on assets, mitigate barriers and work whole-heartedly and caringly.
And
what is interesting is that I am still working on language access- which
essentially brought me to the field of public health. Unfortunately, I am still
working on the same issues right now that I was working on when I hadn’t
started to work in the field of public health.
Overall,
often we have the frameworks but we don’t always know what to do with them. There
is no denying that most Public Health workers want to the right thing…but we
have to understand how to operationalize these public health frameworks.
5.
Why
do you think those challenges still persist?
Similar to my response to question 4- we
conceptually know and we DO want to do the right thing but we don’t always know
how …
6.
What
models within your workforce have worked to encourage health equity?
Enhanced National CLAS
standards—a useful framework; provides more of a business perspective on what implementing
equity looks like. It provides a good justification, and breaks the standards
down into 3 manageable parts.
An increased emphasis about the social
determinants of health model; the (RWJF) County Health Ranking; and Healthy
People 2020 (as well as the Healthiest Wisconsin 2020). Also workforce training
regarding cultural humility and unconscious bias.
7.
At
the beginning of your career, what were some root causes for health inequities
and health disparities? How has those changed (or not at all) following the end
of your career?
When
I first came into Public health we had difficulty understanding how to use social determinants of health
model. Having a life course perspective and having the social determinants
model was a new way of looking at the causes of health outcomes and disparities
more comprehensively and provided a more helpful framework for encouraging system
initiatives.
