Join my projects: opportunities for patients/advocates and public health professionals
This is my 500th edition of Force of Infection! It’s been an honor to write for you for the last 3.5 years. I’ve learned as much as I’ve shared, which has made this venture more meaningful than I ever expected. For instance, I’ve developed a real passion for supporting people who are immunocompromised, and for equipping clinicians on the front lines with up-to-date info. Thank you for reading. Here’s to 500 editions more. 🎉
Now on to today’s post. In my day job as a professor, I lead the Center for Outbreak Response Innovation at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. We are recruiting for partners to help improve healthcare and public health across two different projects, one for patients or their advocates and another for public health professionals.
For Patients and Advocates: Share Your Ideas to Improve Healthcare
What is Voices in Print?
Voices in Print helps patients and advocates publish their ideas for improving healthcare in medical journals. We pair you with professional science writers who help you craft your experience and recommendations into editorials that reach doctors, nurses, and healthcare providers.
Why we do this: Patients often have valuable insights about how to improve care, but medical journals can be hard to access. Complex submission processes and expensive publishing fees keep important voices out of the conversation. We remove those barriers and help to get your story out.
What we’re looking for
We want partners who have specific, actionable ideas for improving care based on their personal experience as a patient or advocate.
Examples of ideas we’ve published:
- Expanding newborn screening for genetic disorders
- Offering trauma-informed care to women who experience complications during labor and delivery
- Screening people with eating disorders for autism
What we don’t accept: General awareness campaigns or “day in the life” stories without specific recommendations.
How to apply
Visit our website and describe your idea in under 200 words using our submission form. Participation is free.
For Public Health Departments: Help Build a Measles Response Repository
We’re collecting real-world operational data from health departments across the U.S. who have managed measles outbreaks in the last few years. This repository will give insight into how health departments should plan to allocate staff and resource based on experiences from their peers.
What we’re collecting
We want to know the operational details about your response:
- What strategies worked and what didn’t
- How long it took to contain the outbreak
- How much staff time was required
- What financial resources were needed
- See our preliminary results here!
How to participate
Are you eligible? If you work at a health department that responded to a measles outbreak since 2024, we want to hear from you.
How to contribute: You can submit data to the repository via our survey here or you can email ORI-Net@jh.edu We are not requesting any personally identifiable or personal health information as part of our data collection.
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Caitlin Rivers
Caitlin Rivers