King Co, WA: Barriers to Early Entry into Prenatal Care
County: King County, WA

Skill Area: Data Analysis and Monitoring

Internship summary
Public Health - Seattle & King County works to protect and improve the health and well-being of all people in King County. Public Health-Seattle & King County's Parent/Child Health Program and Assessment, Policy Development & Evaluation Unit (APDE) will work in collaboration to house the internship project. Gaining a better understanding of the characteristics leading to late entry and barriers to early entry into prenatal care, and their inequities, has been identified as an area needing further effort.

Purpose
The purpose of the internship is to examine characteristics, trends and disparities in early entry into prenatal care. The percentage of King County births with third trimester entry or no prenatal care during pregnancy has been increasing over the last 5 years. This project will include data analysis of rates, trends, and disparities in late/no prenatal care of births to King County residents, particularly by insurance type/status, race/ethnicity, educational level of mother, place of delivery, and geographic area of the county. This project will also analyze survey data to better understand barriers related to late/no prenatal care. Results of these analyses will lead to a better understanding of these issues and focus efforts to reduce the percentage of births with late/no entry into prenatal care.

Goals
Goal is to develop a detailed report, short fact sheet, and presentation for MCH program and epi staff showing County rates, trends, and disparities relating to timing of entry into prenatal care.

Objectives
Objectives: 1) Review national reports and literature to ascertain national trends and data; 2) Analyze and interpret King County resident vital statistics and survey data to examine barriers, rates, trends and disparities; 3) Develop report, fact sheet, and presentation materials to summarize results and facilitate dissemination of results.

Data or analytic tasks and activities involved
The project will involve analysis and summary of national trends and data around late/no prenatal care; analysis of local vital statistics (birth certificate data) and survey (Pregnancy Risk Assessment Monitoring System) data including analyses of trends. The intern will also develop a report, fact sheet and presentation for MCH program and epi staff.

Required data or analytic skills
The internship requires the applicant to be comfortable and versatile in analyzing data and understand the mechanics of working with large datasets, including survey data. The analytic software to be used would most likely include one of the following depending on the preference of the intern: STATA, SPSS or SAS; JoinPoint for analysis of trends; as well as Word, Excel and PowerPoint.

Begin date
May or June, 2010

Housing assistance available?
Summer sublets in apartments or shared housing would be available. We would be happy to provide guidance to the intern in finding a place to live during the 12 weeks.

Public transportation available?
The worksite is located in downtown Seattle and is easily accessible via public transportation from many different locations.