In our second episode featuring public health leaders from the deBeaumont Foundation’s latest group of ’40 Under 40 in Public Health’ honorees, Eric and Anya welcome Sonia Jordan from the Lawrence-Douglas County Health Department in Kansas for a wide-ranging chat about public health informatics, connecting with the community, how local public health workers have adapted to a remote working environment, and more!

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Anya Morozov:

Hello, everyone. Before we start the show, do you know someone who is under 40 and working toward the benefit of state or local public health? If so, nominations for the de Beaumont Foundation’s 40 Under 40 in Public Health, class of 2023, are open now until May 17th. The link to nominate is in the description of today’s episode. Now back to the show.

Eric Ramos:

Hello, everyone, and welcome back to From the Front Row. Today is part of our series featuring the 2021 class of the Beaumont Foundation, 40 Under 40 in Public Health, a group of leaders who changing the face of public health in creative and innovative ways. Sonia Jordan received her master’s in sociology from the University of Oklahoma 2007. She’s currently director of informatics at Lawrence-Douglas County Public Health in Kansas. She has experience in public health informatics, health equity, infectious disease, and public health preparedness. During the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, she served a leading role in the emergency response in mass vaccination clinics. Today, she’s here to talk with us about her experiences working in a county health department and about the field of public health informatics.

I’m Eric Ramos, joined today by Anya Morozov, and if it’s your first time with us, welcome. We are a student-run podcast that talks about major issues of public health and how they’re relevant to anyone, both in and outside the field of public health. Welcome to the show, Sonia.

To start, can you tell us a little bit about your path into public health. When you were first starting out, did you expect to end up where you are today?

Sonia Jordan:

Yeah, well, first off, thank you for having me. I took what I consider to be a non-traditional route into public health. I, as you said in the introduction, have my master’s actually in sociology. I don’t have a master’s in public health. Sociology, I think, is a great field for understanding public health because it helps a student or a person to understand how the infrastructure of society interacts with an individual, and that’s a very common paradigm for public health, like how does the infrastructure that we set up in a community affect somebody’s long-term health? It ended up being a good foundation.

I actually got my master’s in public health and then started a doctorate program in public health, and the doctorate program was actually not really a good fit for me for a variety of reasons. I got my master’s in one location and started the doctorate in a different location, and so the doctorate location was just not the right fit. I ended up just looking for jobs. I knew that I wanted to stay in either social service or government work because that’s where I felt like my strength laid and where I felt would be a good fit for me personally and aligned to my values. But, beyond that, I didn’t really know.

I just applied for a wide variety of jobs and ended up getting a job with the state health department here in Kansas. And, at that point, I really didn’t know much about public health. I really knew very little about public health, knew so little about public health that, in my first week at the state health department, I was Googling, “Okay, what is public health?” I don’t know what it is. I discovered it and I’ve stayed in public health since then. I’ve been in public health now 15, 16 years, and really truly love the field, and really want to stay in public health for the remainder of my career. Yeah, I have a somewhat unusual path to public health, but I am very glad for that path and happy to be where I’m in.

In a long story short, no, I did not imagine I would be where I am, because I didn’t even know that public health as a field really existed. But I will say, even from a very young age, I was like, “I’m going to work in an office.” I knew I wasn’t going to be out in a field, or doing something, building things with my hands. I was like, “I’m going to be an office worker,” and I am. I knew that from a young age.

Eric Ramos:

And there’s nothing wrong with that.

Anya Morozov:

Yeah, I’m glad you found the field of public health.

Sonia Jordan:

Yeah, me too.

Anya Morozov:

And I do agree that, from what I’ve heard about sociology, it does sound like a good complement. One of my classmates, he did his undergrad in sociology and I think it’s added a really good perspective. I also always love talking to folks who are in the field because I feel like very few people have … I knew I wanted to do public health from day one and then I ended up in public health. It’s always these winding paths.

Moving on to our next question, before we talk about your specific role at the Lawrence-Douglas County Public Health Department, I think some folks are a little unfamiliar with what public health informatics is. Can you tell our listeners a little about what public health informatics is and why it’s important?

Sonia Jordan:

Yeah, so informatics is a somewhat newer field to public health. It has been around now for a longer amount of time, maybe 10 to 15 years, but I think only within the past couple of years is it’s starting to infiltrate to local health departments and state health departments. And you see a lot of national organizations starting to have departments of informatics, like ASTHO and NACCHO and those organizations, really starting to pay more attention to it.

Typically, if you’re in a master’s of public health program or in a local health department or state health department, you’re pretty familiar with the field of epidemiology, infectious disease, population health, maternal and child health will oftentimes have data analysts that are referred to as epidemiologists, and informatics is that. It is that traditional epidemiology and utilizing data to understand either the community or the topic or the area, and using things like surveillance and those sorts of tools to understand what the either emergent health issues are or the more chronic health issues are of your community or your population.

But informatics is one step more than that. It’s utilizing data to make informed decisions for a health department or a community. It’s basically data-driven decision making is the way that I think about it. It is the traditional epidemiology. Our department still does community health assessments and data briefs and our Health Equity Report, those sorts of traditional epidemiology things, but it also does internal analytics. For instance, somebody on my team is responsible for our patient dashboard, which is a tool that has the patients that come into our clinic, what program they come in for, what race and ethnicity they are, what age group they are, what geography they represent, so that we can understand the decisions that our clinic is making and how it might affect different populations differently. It’s bigger than just epidemiology. It’s using data and the broad array of data that exists now to make decisions.

And I’ll say that we also are looking at trying to expand how we utilize data as a public health network, so using it beyond just a local health department, but how do we use data across a system of care to make informed decisions about how somebody navigates our system of care, which public health is not ever going to be the big player in a system of care, that’s going to be hospitals and primary care, but our role and our subject matter expertise can be to help people understand how somebody navigates that so that people have that opportunity to navigate it successfully, which is really important for things like behavioral health and mental health and substance use and abuse and addiction. The pathway of care is easy to fall out of, and so we, as a community and as a system, should be trying to build the pathway of care so that individuals can navigate it successfully as easily as possible. And data can help us understand that system as well.

Eric Ramos:

I think that’s super important even now, especially after COVID. [inaudible 00:08:44] make all those decisions. I think definitely being able to have data-driven decisions has been super important in being able to build a strong public health department. What does your role as the director of informatics look like? What does your day-to-day look like?

Sonia Jordan:

That’s a good question. We started this program, I didn’t inherit it, in, I think, 2018 or 2019. And so we had a couple of years where we were just building our program and answering the kind of questions internally that you just asked, like what does the day-to-day look like, what is informatics, those kind of things. But then COVID hit and we had two to three pretty solid years of primarily focusing on COVID. And so there was a point in time, during COVID, in which our department was doing disease investigation, the traditional infectious disease epidemiology, all of the metrics that we released to the community, vaccine dispensing and distribution, and pretty much COVID is all of all our department did.

And so, when we started to come out of COVID a little bit, lift our heads up and look around, I had to have a moment of, “What is my job? What is my job? I’ve forgotten what my job is before. What did I do before COVID?” And we are now, I feel like, getting back to that, which is a really wonderful feeling. Overall, I’m making sure that things are on track for things like data releases. We do some data briefs. We do big reports. Right now, we’re working on our community health assessment, which is really a lot of data, but also we want a lot of community input and engagement on it as well. We are making decisions about how our clinic is going to operate and so I’m making sure that our team is getting the data that we need from that.

We also have more of the management type of things that are like … I didn’t, maybe you all are, but when I was in my master’s program, I didn’t really learn how to do budgets or budget justifications. There’s a lot of management stuff that I do on a day-to-day basis, anything as easy as time sheets and vacation requests, to bigger, okay, we have budget requests we have to meet, we have to make sure that we’re on track, we’re not overspending. Also can’t underspend because, if you underspend on something, then, a lot of times, the state health department or the federal government will be like, “Oh, our interpretation is you don’t need that money, so we’ll just take it back and not give you more in the future.” You have to make sure that you’re spending appropriately.

We also do a lot of leadership type of things, not just me, but our other leaders within the department, that involve things like strategic planning and logic models and performance management. And then it’s very important to me to check in with my team on a regular basis. I don’t have a huge team, but there’s five of us, and I try to just make sure I’m checking in on a daily basis, but then doing those regular intensives to make sure that everything is on track, make sure that they are doing okay as an employee. That’s very important, that they are feeling heard, that they’re feeling listened to, that they’re feeling appreciated, that they’re feeling valued. And that is the kind of thing that you have to just do on a regular basis, and if you don’t do that, then it feels false or it rings untrue.

I also get a lot of opportunities to engage with the community, which I love. I teach leadership classes on a regular basis. I really love that. I get to go to things like county commission meetings and city commission meetings, and those are always, at least, interesting. They’re not always fun, sometimes they’re fun, but they’re always at least interesting. And so I also really enjoy that. And I’ll just say I’m not under 40 anymore. I’m over 40. I was right on the cusp when I got in the 40 Under 40 class. And so I’m at the stage of life also where I have to manage a lot of just family and kids and keeping the house going and alive. And so, between all those things, I have a very full day, but it’s a very rewarding day and I almost always, in the day, content. Yeah.

Eric Ramos:

You sound super busy, so props.

Anya Morozov:

Yeah, thanks for taking the time with us today, my goodness.

Sonia Jordan:

Yeah. Yeah, it’s good. It’s all good.

Eric Ramos:

I’m just curious, is your team working from home? Are they in the office? Are you guys hybrid?

Sonia Jordan:

We are hybrid. That was just unintentionally a very happy accident that we set up for hybrid before COVID. It really worked out well because we would’ve had to do it on the fly and figure it out, but we got a remote work policy in place prior to COVID. We got everyone set up on Surface Pros so that they could work from home with their files. And we got, what’s it called, we got VPN and all of that set up before COVID. Now obviously COVID tested it in unique and unusual ways because we weren’t overly familiar with Zoom, for example, before COVID, or Teams. We use Teams all the time now. We use teams for everything. I think we just had a couple of people who were trying to convert everyone to Teams and everyone was like, “We aren’t going to use Teams,” and then COVID happened, and now we all use Teams all the time.

My team is … our remote work policy is two days at home and I ask them to just have a schedule for that just because it’s easier for me. And then we’re also very flexible. If you have a sick kid, if you are feeling under the weather, if you have a plumber coming, you can work from home, I tend to come into the office because it’s what works well for me. But, for instance, my kids are out of school on Friday, so I’ll work from home on Friday. We are hybrid and different people do that differently depending on the department.

Eric Ramos:

It’s interesting that you guys had that before COVID. You guys know something we didn’t.

Sonia Jordan:

I know. I don’t know what it was. We contract with it and they were the ones that recommended the Surface Pro and the VPN, and I think they just realized that it was a best practice that was coming to be able to allow your workers to be remote, and so they were the ones that pushed it and we think, gratefully, said yes. And so I think it just worked out really well because we were able to transition to home pretty easily. Yeah, it worked out okay.

Anya Morozov:

You mentioned a lot of things that you do in your day-to-day work as the director of informatics. What would you say is your favorite part of working in a local health department?

Sonia Jordan:

Probably the connection that you get to a community. I am a pretty extroverted person, so I like connecting with people. Part of the reason why I like to be in office over remote is that I get to connect with people, but working in a local health department, at least in the town and the county that I am in, I get to interact pretty regularly with city staff, with county staff, with the hospital, with different partners, with community members and with advocacy groups. And so I really enjoy being a part of a local government system, and I really enjoy getting to be influential in how a system works because, unless you are at a very high level within the federal government, you’re not always going to be the person that can influence and affect somebody’s day-to-day life, and when you’re in a local government structure, you can.

You are advocating for things that you think will improve the life of your people, and not just a removed people, but your people, your neighbors, your friends, your colleagues, the people you go to church with, the people you go to school with, the play people you play soccer with, and so that is a piece that I really like. Again, I tend to pepper a lot with this sociology term, but I enjoy the praxis of it. Praxis is a word in sociology that means the practice of something, not just theoretical or hypothetical or theory-based, you’re actually involved in the day-to-day practice of something. I enjoy the praxis of working in a local health department, of getting to actually do, and we’re a small enough health department that you do a lot here.

I do occasionally still do disease investigation, if it’s needed, for the day, or contact tracing during COVID or filling in for somebody on a panel that needs to happen. I enjoy that piece of it. And then I think I really like the flexibility of it as well, and this is going to be not a universal statement for local health departments. I think it really depends on your culture and who your director is and how your board is set up and all of that stuff. But I have a fair amount of flexibility in moving my department forward in a way that I want them to move forward. And so, for example, I really value data accessibility, and so we deal a lot in data and we have a very data-savvy community, but we also have a lot of people who don’t understand why something like a confidence interval would matter or what is meant by a, I don’t know, a mortality rate, like why does a rate matter or why would you age adjust something?

And so it’s really important to me that our data is accessible to the people who we want to use it, which is our community. We play a lot in data visualization. I don’t feel a strong need to have everything in a graph be the same color, the same font, the same this and that, in a way that’s very academic. I would rather use plain language so that somebody can look at that graph and immediately understand, okay, African Americans in our community have a higher rate of poverty, and I know this because the title of the graph says African Americans in Douglas County have a higher rate of poverty, and the bar in that graph is orange and every other bar is blue, and orange means it’s significant. I’d rather have that kind of accessibility right off the bat.

At a federal government level or an academic institution, you’re going to have to meet those data and publication guidelines, and, here, I get to set what I think that is for our department, and so I appreciate the flexibility of that as well. That’s something that’s really important to me, and I think that’s something that probably happens easier at a local health department level than at a state or federal level, or maybe even a think tank or an institution or something like that. Those are my things. Yeah.

Anya Morozov:

You mentioned budget management earlier, and I think data visualization as well, are both things that I think people at the University of Iowa College of Public Health are starting to recognize are really emerging needs in the field. We’ve had a lot more emphasis on data visualization, which exciting to know that it’s applicable.

Sonia Jordan:

Yeah, I think so. Yeah, for sure.

Eric Ramos:

I know you talked a little bit about how, with those visualizations, you want to make accessible, and you talked about how Black people have higher rates of poverty, just lots of more of an equitable work. In 2020, you played [inaudible 00:21:16] role in developing the Douglas County Health Equity Report. Can you talk about what you learned about through creating that report, some initiatives that maybe came from that?

Sonia Jordan:

Yeah. We did the Health Equity Report, initially, I believe, in 2018 or 2019. I’m sorry. My dates are getting fuzzy. And it was actually the first major project for our department, our informatics department, and it was also the first time that we had done a comprehensive overview of data, of health, data from a really disaggregated perspective, and it landed really well within the community. People were very eager for this data that was primarily disaggregated by race. We had a couple of examples of how we could disaggregate by census tract or by geography or income, for example, but we primarily focused on disaggregation by race and ethnicity. And there were a lot of pieces that we learned, both from a data perspective, from a quantitative perspective, understanding some of the disparities that occur within our community, primarily along the social determinants of health area, so things like poverty and median income and home ownership.

There were a lot of things that we learned that were not always … our perception of how something had existed did not always match what the data was telling us, and the data was telling us that we had inequities occurring by different racial populations within our community. Part of this is you have to understand the makeup of our county and our community. I’m in Douglas County, who is named after Stephen Douglas, so Abraham Lincoln’s debate foe, but who was somebody who was a very strong union advocate. Most of Kansas counties are named after abolitionists from that period because we were a free state and we were established as a free state. In the eastern part of the state where we are located, this was a very prominent viewpoint, and it was something that is a well-established part of our history, and it’s something that we still connect to on a regular basis.

For example, there was an abolitionist named John Brown, who’s very important to Lawrence and Douglas County, who went to Missouri and started raids and Missourians, Quantrill, came back and raided Lawrence, burned Lawrence down. The free state ideology is very important here. Our high school is called Free State. Our beer is called Free State. There’s John Brown murals all over town. This is a very important idea to us. And so we are also a very progressive city. We are, untraditional for Kansas, but traditional for us, progressive community. For us to be both this free state ideology that’s extremely important to our community, and for us to be an extremely progressive community, then for us to say, “Hey, we still have these disparities existing among all of these different dimensions of life,” I think was really eye-opening for people. And, to our communities credit, they really dove into that and really just wanted to learn more and wanted to address this, and they didn’t want to shy away or hide away from it.

While we did learn this understanding of the different disparities and inequities that existed within our community, I also learned a lot about our community, our community’s willingness to engage in hard conversations, our community’s willingness to hear things that aren’t always comfortable. I learned a lot about myself as well, my ability to talk about different equities and disparities that exist. How do you discuss things that are uncomfortable that we are not always raised in learning how to discuss, dimensions of race, for example? Your generation, I think, is maybe getting better at this, but my generation, we didn’t really grow up talking about all of those dimensions. And so you have to learn how to talk with communities and engage with them in a way that that’s both respectful and also going to be an engaging conversation. You can go too far in one direction, it’s not an engaging conversation, but you have to also still be respectful to an audience.

And then just learned a lot about data and how we want to use data and what it looks like to focus on disaggregation and what it looks like to focus on equity and data, and even things like we don’t have a lot of access to local LGBTQI data. And so that was a big red flag that a lot of people flagged for us on the release of the report, and we had to explore that and try to figure out how do we address this appropriately? Because at the end of the day, we don’t have that local data, but we still have to address it. We can’t just pretend like it doesn’t exist. We have to get into that and address it appropriately. There were a lot of things that I learned throughout that process that were both focusing on actual public health and health disparities, but also just a lot in terms of our community and how we interact and how we engage and how you start interesting conversations and how you really put something out there so that it can be utilized.

And then I think part of your question was about how it’s been utilized, and I’ve been really happy with … it seems to have been utilized a lot by local officials and elected officials, which I think is great. Every once in a while, I’ll watch a meeting and it’ll come up and somebody will say, “I’m looking at the Health Equity Report and I’m seeing this data.” And that happened, I think, just maybe two weeks ago there was a school board meeting and one of the elected school board officials was like, “I’m looking at this report and it says this, and have you,” talking to a staff member, have you looked at this report and what are your thoughts on it?” That kind of thing is still happening, and that’s always really exciting to see that your work is out there and being utilized in a way that you hope it is, which is to make, again, those data-driven, informed decisions. That’s always very exciting when that happens.

Anya Morozov:

Yeah. I’m studying epidemiology and work a lot with data, that’s the goal at the end of the day is having the data you gather and present be presented in a way that it can be utilized by the community.

Sonia Jordan:

Yeah. I love epidemiologists because they just crack me up, and I consider myself to be in that field, even though I went the nontraditional way, but that’s definitely the area that I like the most. But I think, epidemiologists, I just just love them because I just picture them working behind their computer on their little spreadsheets or in their SaaS or [inaudible 00:28:34] and they’re like, “Oh, that’s interesting,” and then they just keep going. We train and teach our epidemiologists very well in this country, and I feel like the one step that we need to take further is that piece, like, okay, yes, you find it interesting, and, yes, the person sitting next to you also working in their spreadsheet probably also finds it interesting, but then how do you get that out there so that it is interesting to other people, the people who can make decisions with it or the people who are affected by it?

That’s the trick. That’s the harder thing to do. But, yes, I have a very soft thought in my heart for epidemiologists.

Anya Morozov:

I’m glad that the Health Equity Report in your community was able to be utilized because, also, I think that it’s one thing to talk about health disparities at a national level, but when you’re able to get down to your community level and really show that this is what this looks like in our community, it tells a completely different story. And I also like you’re aware of your community’s history and you’re trying to get that perspective in there as well.

Yeah. Anyway, I think that’s all really great. What is something that you think the future public health workforce needs to be prepared for?

Sonia Jordan:

I have my thoughts about informatics and data that I’ve talked about already, things like data visualization and data accessibility and engaging with the community, and those are things that are becoming more discussed and more prominent in the local public health field. But I also think that, thinking about the public health system as a whole, I think the biggest thing that we are going to have to figure out is how to really be innovative and pushing forward public health in our communities, and then also at a national level, because I think we have a lot of the foundational things pretty well covered, but then how do we move beyond that to be really what our community needs?

In Kansas, for example, we have a lot of local health departments. We’re a home rule state. We don’t all align to one state health department. Other states are set up that way. I don’t know. How is Iowa set up? Do you all know?

Anya Morozov:

Well, we have 99 counties, and I think almost everyone has its own health department.

Sonia Jordan:

Health department, okay.

Anya Morozov:

There is a state health department as well.

Sonia Jordan:

But they’re not in control of all the local health departments. That’s how we’re set up. There’s a state health department and there’s local health departments, and we work together, but we’re not controlled by the state health. I’m not a state health department employee. I’m a local health department employee. Kansas is set up similarly, and there’s a lot of rural communities in Kansas, and that means that we have a lot of small local health departments. And so are we set up in the most effective way to serve that community?

For example, we do not have to be the primary vaccine dispenser for childhood immunizations in our community because we have several pediatricians’ offices. However, a local health department in the western part of the state might need to be that. They may not have a pediatrician’s office, they may not even have a primary care office, and so they need to be able to provide childhood immunizations. But what else does that community need that is not being worked on while they’re doing childhood immunizations? What are their disparities that exist? They may not have a lot of racial disparities, or they may not be able to look at those because of their smaller numbers, but I bet that they have some related to income or education or they might have other access issues.

Do they have access to the behavioral healthcare that they need? Farmers, for example, they are in one of the most precarious fields because you never know what your income is going to be year to year. It’s so dependent on things that are just out of your control, like weather. And so how do they access behavioral health? How do they talk about mental health? How do they talk about substance use in a way that is going to be available and accessible for their community members, not turn someone off and say, “Oh, I don’t need that,” because they’re from a different generation or a different style or a different belief system. I think moving to a level of innovation to be what your community actually needs is something that I think that we’re really going to have to think about and figure out.

I don’t really have the answers. I just think that that is something that we need to think about how that happens on a national level, because there are states who are doing really innovative things and are moving public health forward, but that’s not all states. And so how does a state like Kansas, for example, do that effectively and efficiently? Those are questions that are really interesting. Also, thinking about what are going to be the long-term ramifications of COVID that we’re unable to see right now regarding mental health and social well-being, even isolation a little bit, social isolation? Public health laws and statutes and regulations might be, in some states, under attack. They may not see the value in public health. How do you engage if you’re in a community that was really anti-mask or anti-vaccine, for instance, how do you engage with that community post-COVID, I think is a really interesting question.

I think is our public health infrastructure okay, I think, is also a really interesting question. Are our staff okay? Are our staff able to engage with the community? Because maybe they were yelled at by the community a lot. That could be a really hard thing to ask somebody to do. And so I think those kind of questions are what a lot of the next generation of public health is going to have to figure out and how to do that in a way that’s going to be … again, you want to be innovative and you want to be pushing the boundaries, but also you have to make sure that your people are okay as well.

I think that’s really interesting, and it’s going to be really challenging because there’s a lot of people that aren’t okay in public health, and I don’t really, know beyond that individual and personal level and that personal interaction, how do you address this on a system level? Because that’s what public health is, right? It’s the system level. Yeah. I don’t know, other than to say I, there’s a lot of people that aren’t okay, and so that’s a hard thing to address for a field.

Anya Morozov:

Yeah, I know in Iowa too, in local health departments, there’s a lot of conversations about mental health and, I guess, I don’t know, are you familiar with the Midwestern Public Health Training center?

Sonia Jordan:

Yeah.

Anya Morozov:

Yeah. The folks who are based at the University of Iowa working on that have a lot of mental health stuff in the works.

Sonia Jordan:

Yeah. And I think all of that is good, and I also think it’s a structure and a system issue. The structures are in place. We have the system that gives us the results that we currently have. We’re geared to what we have, and so I’m just really interested to see how things change. Work is changing a lot, for example. How will that settle into what work looks like in the future? I don’t know, but I’m interested to see how it changes.

And I feel similarly about public health. What big system and structural issues are going to change so that we end up with a different public health system 20 years down the road, or 30 years down the road. That’s interesting, because I don’t think it can stay the same. I don’t think the funding quite allows us to stay the same. I don’t think the structure quite allows us to stay the same because it’s not sustainable. I don’t think community needs are going to allow us to stay the same. That’s really interesting to see and think about how the structure of something’s going to change to give you different results. Yeah, I don’t know. I don’t know, but I have ideas.

Eric Ramos:

It’s very interesting that you say that and how you talk about it, because I’m getting my master’s in hospital administration, so it’s like I’m on the hospital admin side, and I think it’s like we’re dealing with a lot of the same stuff. It’s just the physical burnout, the mental health issues. Obviously, reimbursement methods are changing and the shift in your population health. We’re going to have to change the way, not only in which we deliver healthcare, but which we finance healthcare. I think we’re having a lot of the same conversations on the hospital admin side. I think it’s very interesting to see that. I guess we’re similar across the board there.

Sonia Jordan:

Yeah, yeah. I think public health had it hard, and I think hospitals had it hard, I think school boards had it hard, but I think also everyone had it hard. And so, yeah, I look up and I look around at what other organizations are dealing with, and it’s all similar. I think a lot of people are burned out. I think working moms had it really especially challenging during COVID. It’ll be interesting to see if motherhood changes. That would be really interesting because there’s conversations about, well, how do we make workplaces more family friendly, and how do we make them better for working moms? And I think that’s great and that should be done, but also how motherhood happens should be different. It shouldn’t be all mothers. It should be mothers and fathers and support systems and accessible childcare and affordable childcare and safe schools and all of that kind of stuff that has to change.

And changing what you can control, which is your work setting, I think is great and should be done, but that’s not the root cause of what the issue is, in my opinion. That’s my opinion. But, yeah, so it’s like, yeah, again, going back to that system and structure level thinking of things just slightly different.

Anya Morozov:

Yeah, that’s what I love about public health. It’s also the most challenging part is trying to [inaudible 00:39:18] those root causes that are usually pretty deeply embedded, but, if you can change that, then you’re going to be making positive changes across the system rather than just fix [inaudible 00:39:31]-

Sonia Jordan:

Your one individual workplace or your one individual family or whatever it is. Yeah. Yeah. Agreed.

Eric Ramos:

Okay. I think we’re down to our last question, and it’s a question we ask of all our guests. What was something you thought you knew, but were later wrong about? It doesn’t have to be about your career, it can be about anything in life, but just something you thought you knew, but were later wrong about.

Sonia Jordan:

During COVID, about probably every day, there was something that I was wrong about. And I try to take the approach of, and I try to instill this in my kids as well, which is, if you’re not failing at something, then that means that you’re probably playing it a little too safe and you’re not trying something, and so I’d rather have you try. I use that with my team as well, like, “Let’s just try it. What’s the worst that can happen? Let’s just try it.” And so oftentimes that means that I am, wrong about something, I misunderstand something, misinterpret something. During COVID, there were so many ways to go about doing something that oftentimes, especially at the beginning, I’d be like, “This is the right way to do it. I know this is the right way to do it,” and then I would be wrong, and it would be like somebody else overrode me and we’re doing it this way, and it was fine.

And so a lot of that kind of stuff happened during COVID, but I was thinking about this question when it was sent to me earlier, and I think the one I’m going with is more personal and about my family. I thought that, for sure, we were going to have two kids and that we were going to be a family of four, and that was going to be it for our family, and we have three kids. My daughter was born in January of 2020, which is poor timing upon reflection, but we didn’t know that then, and so now we are a family of five. We have a girl. We had two boys, now we have a girl, and she pretty much just runs our house. That’s the happiest thing I was wrong about probably in my life, because she just adds a lot of joy and dimension to our family. Yeah, that’s probably what I would say is I really thought our family was going to be one way, and it’s different, and it’s better, it’s better that way. Yeah.

Eric Ramos:

I love that answer. I love when people answer it a way that’s not career focused. I like learning a little bit about people. Great answer. Well, I think that’s all we have for you, Sonia. Thank you so much. We really appreciate your time. Learned a little bit about Lawrence. What’s a hospital there?

Sonia Jordan:

Lawrence Memorial Hospital, LMH Health is what they go by. Yep, yep.

Eric Ramos:

Yeah, first semester, when was it, last year first semester, my first semester here, we did a case competition, and Lawrence Health was the sponsor that year for University of Kansas, so we did a [inaudible 00:42:22] Lawrence Health and the shift to telehealth and all that stuff.

I recognized, when you were talking about Lawrence Health, I feel think I know about this [inaudible 00:42:30]. That’s probably why.

Sonia Jordan:

Yep, yep. We also have the University of Kansas here, which I didn’t talk about, but that’s a big player in our community as well and influences the culture of our whole community. Yep.

Eric Ramos:

Cool. Well, thank you so much. I appreciate it.

Sonia Jordan:

Yeah, of course.

Anya Morozov:

That’s it for our episode this week. Big thanks to Sonia Jordan for joining us today. This episode was hosted and written by Anya Morozov and Eric Ramos, and edited and produced by Anya Morozov.

You can learn more about the University of Iowa College of Public Health on Facebook, and our podcast is available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and SoundCloud. If you enjoyed this episode and would like to help support the podcast, please share it with your colleagues, friends, or anyone interested in public health. Have a suggestion for our team? You can reach us at CPH-gradambassador@uiowa.edu. This episode was brought to you by the University of Iowa College of Public Health. Until next week, stay healthy, stay curious, and take care.