ASU AZ Infectious Disease Epi (AIDE) Lab & Public Health Program
The ASU AZ Infectious Disease Epi (AIDE) Lab & Public Health Training Program is led by ASU epidemiologist Megan Jehn. ASU AIDE contains a public health training and a research lab unit. The public health training program encompasses the Student Outbreak Response Team (SORT) and the COVID-19 Case Investigation and Community Response Team. In partnership with the Maricopa County Department of Public Health, their work focuses on multiple efforts to investigate and respond to the spread of infectious diseases in Arizona. Today, the team consists of trained students, volunteers, and staff tracking the novel coronavirus by investigating individual cases, assessing the spread of COVID-19 in the Maricopa County community, and assisting communities disproportionately affected by COVID-19. Since July 2020, the ASU COVID-19 Case Investigation Team has trained over 450 case investigators and has completed over 80,000 COVID-19 case investigations. Alongside this on-the-ground work, the AIDE Lab models COVID-19 trends and mitigation measures, researches best practices in public health workforce development, and disseminates findings to support the wider development of public health research.
This collection includes training videos, presentation slide decks, staff handbooks, policy and procedure manuals, research projects, and reports related to the investigation and response to COVID-19 and other disease outbreaks in Arizona. These materials may be informative for local and regional efforts to mitigate infectious disease outbreaks in the modern era.
Being prepared to respond to difficult situations that arise in public health practice is an essential skill for the public health workforce.This empathic responding guide was designed to train students, volunteers, and staff of the ASU COVID-19 Case Investigation Team. The guide provides an overview of empathic communication, walks through a framework for responding with empathy, and outlines common difficult situations that arise in public health along with ways to respond with empathy to these situations. This guide can be adapted to a wide variety of settings and is meant to be used as a training tool for public health case investigators and other staff. This guide, available in a full and an abridged version, can be paired with hands-on workshops to provide engaging continuing education opportunities for public health teams.
This communication guide outlines examples of specific situations that are difficult to respond to, and pairs them with examples of how to respond with empathy. This guide depicts these difficult case statements as rows with bold, italic text. Beneath each scenario is an example of an empathic response (underlined) that can lead to a factual response or survey prompt (Figure 1). The responses use empathic communication to show the case that you are witnessing the emotion, rather than moving to the survey without acknowledging emotion. There is no one right answer to any difficult case statement.
Being prepared to respond to difficult situations that arise in public health practice is an essential skill for the public health workforce.This empathic responding guide was designed to train students, volunteers, and staff of the ASU COVID-19 Case Investigation Team. The guide provides an overview of empathic communication, walks through a framework for responding with empathy, and outlines common difficult situations that arise in public health along with ways to respond with empathy to these situations. This guide can be adapted to a wide variety of settings and is meant to be used as a training tool for public health case investigators and other staff. This guide can be paired with hands-on workshops to provide engaging continuing education opportunities for public health teams.