Lauren Lavin:

Welcome to another episode of Plugged in to Public Health. I’m Lauren Lavin and today, we’re going to be diving into an inspiring conversation with Kassie Owens, a passionate public health advocate and master’s of health administration and health policy student at the University of Iowa. Kassie shares her unique journey that led her to explore health policy and management, highlighting her recent global health internship in Romania. Throughout this episode, we’ll explore Kassie’s work with the LGBTQ community, her research on health care systems abroad, and the lessons she’s bringing back to the US health care landscape. Get ready to hear about cultural exchanges, health care access, and Kassie’s drive to make a positive impact on health care equity. Let’s get Plugged in to Public Health.

Hi, Kassie. Thank you so much for being on the podcast today. If you’d like to start off by introducing yourself and also telling us a little bit about how you ended up at the University of Iowa.

Kassie Owens:

Yeah, absolutely. Thank you for having me. My name is Kassie Owens, she/they pronouns. I’m originally from Marion, Iowa, so right by Cedar Rapids. And I started as a biology major at Coe College in Cedar Rapids and I was pursuing pharmacy, so really wanted to be a practitioner and get that experience in the medical sphere, I suppose. And as I was nearing the end of graduation, preparing for my PCAP, of course, we had the pandemic-

Lauren Lavin:

Got to love it.

Kassie Owens:

… around my junior year. That shifted a lot of my plans. I was thinking a lot more about what I wanted to do with my life and a lot of that I found really wasn’t for me, being behind a counter all day helping patients with medications. I really wanted to make more of a community impact as I was more politically involved in my undergraduate program than I had been previously. That led me to finding the College of Public Health at University of Iowa and be a Master of Health Administration. So I have finished my first year in that program and am going into my second year and recently added on the dual degree for MPH in policy.

Lauren Lavin:

Oh, my God.

Kassie Owens:

Yeah. I know it’s a lot, but it really aligns with what I want to do. I came into this thinking, “Oh, I could just work as a hospital CEO or something and get more on the ground professional experience so I could use that information for policy.” I didn’t know with health policy that you can just go into it. You can read. You can learn. You can help revise and edit policies. I really look forward to that process and I’m really glad to be here learning more.

Lauren Lavin:

So you didn’t come in knowing that you were going to do an MPH too. You added that upon learning about that option?

Kassie Owens:

Yeah. I always talked about it in my graduate interviews, how I was interested in policy, politics and every one of them asked me, “Why aren’t you doing this dual degree?” Or, “Did you know that we have this?” And I would always explain it like, “Oh, I’m just getting that experience.” But then I took health policy my first semester here and I was like, “Oh, this is really valuable information.”

Lauren Lavin:

[inaudible 00:03:37].

Kassie Owens:

Dr. Kaskie has a lot of wisdom that he imparted on us and I really loved that, as challenging as it was.

Lauren Lavin:

Does adding on the MPH add on time because you [inaudible 00:03:51].

Kassie Owens:

Yeah. So I will be here for three years instead of two, which is fine by me. I love it here. It gives me a little more time to breathe. So [inaudible 00:04:02] that.

Lauren Lavin:

That’s totally true, before you have to make another big decision. I get that. Recently though, you spent the summer in Romania, correct?

Kassie Owens:

Yes.

Lauren Lavin:

What motivated you to pursue an internship in Romania this last summer?

Kassie Owens:

For my internship with the Master of Health Administration Program, I was really looking for an experience that was really new and different from what I am familiar with here in Iowa, as I have been around hospital areas pretty much my whole life. Cedar Rapids is a major metropolitan area with St. Luke’s and Mercy Hospital, so I was a patient under those systems and that’s kind of what got me involved in health care in the first place is having those institutions nearby and of course, now living here in Iowa City, being there, University of Iowa and everything. I wanted to get out to another state, perhaps another country to just see something completely different, make the most of my experience here as a graduate student. So I really looked all over the place. I applied to a bunch of different programs all over the country. I originally was looking to pursue an internship in [inaudible 00:05:20] that is a partnership with the MHA program and a previous MHA graduate, so it’s offered every year to one of the MHA students. And there was another student that was interested in that as well, my classmate, Baroon.

I was looking for opportunities and I told my advisors that I told Dr. Wilson and Gwen that I was really stressed out and looking for anything that would work possibly. And Dr. Wilson very kindly offered me the opportunity of looking into Romania as my internship opportunity. I looked into it more and Sophie Switzer got me connected with one of the advisors there at Babes-Bolyai University at the Cluj School of Public Health, and her name’s Roxy. She’s super cool. I talked a bit with her. I got more familiar with Romania. I looked up a lot because I had no idea. I’d never signed up [inaudible 00:06:30].

Lauren Lavin:

I’m a preparer too. Especially when I’m traveling, I like to know all of the things before I show up.

Kassie Owens:

Yeah, absolutely. I wrote up my interest statement and everything and they were really excited to bring me on.

Lauren Lavin:

That’s great.

Kassie Owens:

I was just excited to… A completely different new experience that I never would’ve thought.

Lauren Lavin:

Yeah, I think people think that… And while the US health care system is really an end of one, going to other places, you don’t know what new ideas are out there. Even if they may not be directly translatable, you can still gather new ideas that you can bring back here and apply in its own way.

Kassie Owens:

Yes. Definitely.

Lauren Lavin:

[inaudible 00:07:10] become better US citizens when we see more of the world. Can you tell us a little bit about the program that you did over the summer?

Kassie Owens:

Yeah, so what they call it through the Cluj School of Public Health is the Global Health Internship. So it’s really a broad program and there were a bunch of options that they offered with the, basically informational packet that they sent me. There’s different opportunities through research, rural health focus, medical focus. It’s a really broad spectrum of things that you can do and I appreciated that. And the section of the program that I wanted to most focus on was their community health program.

So in that program, what that entailed is finding different nonprofits in the area that I could work with and have some sort of community focus. I was most passionate about and have been passionate about for a lot of my career as a student is the LGBTQ community as I am a member of the lovely community we have. And in Romania, it’s Orthodox Christian country, so compared to a lot of other European Union countries, there are more stigmas, a lot less rights for LGBTQ people. So I really wanted to look more into that and what their community is doing now to cope with that or any sort of activism they’re doing and how that pertains to health care as well, specifically issues that a lot of the world is talking about right now with gender-affirming care, surgery, hormones, reproductive care, any sort of things that are tangentially related to that.

So I worked with some advisors with the Cluj School of Public Health, several really smart, amazing people, different professors, people that had taught at the college for a long time, and they were able to connect me with a local nonprofit called the Queer Sisterhood of Cluj. So I worked directly with the head of that organization, Ruth, and she is lovely. She talked to me a lot about the history of different LGBTQ issues in Romania and how they dealt with that discrimination over time. We made a plan to really start with [inaudible 00:10:00] health promotion sort of campaign. I started off brainstorming, wanted to do some sort of flyer that we would hand out, but we ultimately came to the conclusion that it would be easier to do and also easier to get to a bunch of people to do more of a social media campaign.

I’m working with their Instagram to eventually, I’m still working on it, but posting some stories and posts that talk about LGBTQ Health in Romania, some basic vocabulary, different stories from people. I did a lot of interviewing of different people in the community of Romania and using that information in a way that helped advertise those issues and normalize those issues so that more people are aware of it, especially medical providers. So a lot of health care for LGBTQ people, even in the US, is poor, lackluster, missing a lot of empathy, missing a lot of just having that experience or knowledge really. I’m still finishing up on that.

And a side project I worked in to complete more of my [inaudible 00:11:28] for the MHA program is a stakeholder project, different stakeholders in Romanian health care and doing an analysis of that. I completed a bunch more interviews with different professionals in different areas of health care, hospital managers, tensioners, public and private practice leaders, just a bunch of different people, educators. And I put together a presentation on that and presented it to a couple of my advisors that were there, since a lot of people were gone for the summer. Unfortunately, the college was pretty empty, but they told me that I presented it well and I’m glad that I was able to summarize that information in a way that was understandable to them, who had lived the experience and hopefully also understandable to people in the US as well if I can take that presentation and share it with other people as well.

Lauren Lavin:

It sounds like you had a really busy summer and you were doing some pretty cool projects. One of my follow-up questions to that, given your identity, were you nervous about going to Romania or was that not something that you even considered prior to going?

Kassie Owens:

Yeah. I wasn’t sure how I would interact with the community there. I’m generally fairly familiar with rural areas, especially being from Iowa, people that aren’t necessarily as accepting of my identity, so I had a little bit more confidence than maybe some other people in more liberal bubbles, as I would say, that have a lot of people that accept them since was more familiar with people that don’t necessarily. But going anywhere with a different culture and not knowing how they will respond to you as an American is kind of scary.

Lauren Lavin:

That’s totally fair. You referenced how you did these interviews, but do you want to maybe expand on that, or how did you involve the local community and researchers in your work?

Kassie Owens:

I started with interview questions. I did a lot of research and background into Romanian health care and the LGBTQ community as well, and had those interview questions reviewed by my advisors and Ruth with the Queer Sisterhood to get them to review, look over, make any suggestions since they have more knowledge as Romanians. They responded very well to my questions. I have a little bit of a background in journalism. I’m a little bit familiar with interviewing, and I think that helped a lot when I was trying to put together those questions.

Lauren Lavin:

Yeah, absolutely. How do you think that some of the lessons that you learned from your work in Romania apply to either other places in the world or the US?

Kassie Owens:

Health care is a huge thing that affects all of us, which is one of the most interesting things about it and why I want to continue to work on it since it is so applicable everywhere. Everyone needs and knows health care. With Romanian health care, I think a lot of similar issues to US health care arose as I was interviewing and talking to people, even other students in the area that had experience directly with Romanian health care. A lot of issues with staffing, I think has been a huge thing worldwide.

Issues with funding, which arose differently, I would say, than funding issues in the US since Romania started with a communist system from about the 40s, like 1945-ish to 1989. It was a brief period of time, but it was a very foundational time in their society and they built a lot of health care institutions around that, so there’s a lot of hospitals and things that were built on public funding. And they do still have the social health care insurance system that is very centralized. They’re not under the communist rule anymore. It’s a little more different now, but a lot of their infrastructure has not been updated in a long time since it was all-

Lauren Lavin:

Yeah. That makes sense.

Kassie Owens:

It was established at that time and they didn’t really anticipate much growth. The social health insurance system doesn’t necessarily fund a lot of the needs that they have. As I was talking to providers and health managers, they talked about how different treatments for patients still have greater financial needs than social health insurance can allow. They have to make up for that from the institution itself, which really hurts their margins. And they’re looking into broadening into more private institutions since that’s a completely new arena for them within the last 30, 40 years. As they’re branching out into more private institutions, I think that might help a little bit in diversifying funds, but also just noting that the experiences in health care management and public health are applicable to anywhere in the world, really. It’s a similar experience with anyone in health care leadership and anyone trying to make decisions for budgeting health care for the community, things like that.

Lauren Lavin:

The budgeting portion of that is something that everyone can relate to. There never seems to be enough money, or workers, or even time in the health care system. I’m guessing that is not unique to the US.

Kassie Owens:

Definitely not.

Lauren Lavin:

Looking forward then, what are some of your hopes for health care access and equity? You can either talk about this in the Romanian lens or in the US lens, or both.

Kassie Owens:

Working with a totally different health care system in Romania helped me conceptualize what I think could improve with US health care and vice versa, what they could improve with Romanian Health care, since of course, we can always improve with any system we have. But that systemic improvement is something I’m very passionate about and want to focus on in my career as I’m potentially working on policy, or working with other health care leaders in government, within nonprofits or other institutions. Working towards improving systems and having policies that better help the community as a whole and don’t necessarily just help certain institutions, particularly for-profit institutions, as money in health care is such a major issue in the US and everything is so expensive.

And that’s part of what inspired me to go into health care management, health care policy and what I want to continue to think about through my career as my main inspiration for whatever I’m going through. And obviously, with helping affordability in health care, that will then help access and equity, which could highly improve in the US and could improve in Romania as well. They also talked about how a lot of their rural communities don’t have that access for health care, and we have a lot of the same struggles here in Iowa as well with so many critical access hospitals and other things. I think having that experience of seeing another system that also has those same issues and seeing how they address it maybe a little bit differently will be helpful in my future career.

Lauren Lavin:

That’s great. Then, what are some of the key takeaways from your time in Romania, either personally or professionally?

Kassie Owens:

Yeah, that is a great question. I would say personally, one of the key takeaways that will stay with me is that we’re not all that different all over the world. I also met with some Nigerian students that go to Babes-Bolyai University, and they had a very different perspective on being in Romania and perspectives like that really matter wherever you go in health care.

Lauren Lavin:

Absolutely.

Kassie Owens:

That is one thing that I would take away for sure. I guess the next thing I would take away is that any sort of diversity is positive for the community. And I’ve known this for a while, but especially being exposed to different cultures as far as language goes and having a language barrier for myself, whereas I’m used to it being the other way around, coming from the US where English is the main language and in Romania, English is very much a secondary language. Having more accessibility for language in health care I think is something that would be important to work on in the future.

Lauren Lavin:

I think that’s a really important takeaway too. We’re pretty privileged as English-speaking Americans that wherever we go, English exists or is the secondary language. I can’t imagine even just traveling for pleasure purposes if your just language was so uncommon that you couldn’t even communicate in a new place. That would be really difficult. It becomes even more dire of a situation when you’re trying to communicate something like a health care need that is time sensitive.

Kassie Owens:

And that getting out of my comfort zone leads me to my final takeaway, which would be just try different things. Try new things. I’ve done that really my whole life. I am always one to jump into new opportunities and really take action in what I’m passionate about. Having this experience in Romania really cemented that for me, that just going for something that you care about. Even if it seems a bit more scary or something that might be very intimidating, people aren’t that different from you, so you belong. I feel like I can make belonging for myself as a leader and to any other leaders, I would also say that is that you can make a place where you belong. And yeah, that’s one of the best takeaways I have, I think.

Lauren Lavin:

I love it. Do you have any advice for students who would want to pursue a summer abroad opportunity?

Kassie Owens:

Yeah. I would say be prepared for anything weather-wise because it was the hottest summer in Romania to-date, as we have had around the world very hot summers and they don’t have a lot of the infrastructure for air conditioning. So I bought a little hand fan and that was really my go-to, having that hand fan. I would also recommend making connections wherever you’re going because you might just only have a connection with the director or whoever you’re communicating with when you apply to a program, but having more people in your host country, wherever you’re going, to work with. If you’re working with the community or working with other students, maybe other practitioners, anyone really, just having those connections established ahead of time really helps save you fear of being in a new place, saves you time in introducing yourself to a lot of people. I know I had to introduce myself to a lot of different people. For the purpose of my project, having more contacts ahead of time would’ve helped me in getting started with it sooner and maybe scheduling interviews ahead of time as well.

For advice, I would look into funding opportunities, any sort of financial assistance because this internship that I did is unpaid and it’s very important for me to express that to other people as not everyone has the same opportunities financially. I was able to get a funding grant through the university, but I wish I had looked into other funding opportunities because I know there are so many, not only through the university, but otherwise, you can find more funding. That’s always a good idea for traveling is to have a budget and to have extra funds to work with.

Lauren Lavin:

Absolutely. That’s a great final piece of advice. Thank you so much for coming on the podcast today. You provided a lot of really great information that I’m hoping that our listeners found useful as well.

Kassie Owens:

Thank you for having me.

Lauren Lavin:

Thank you for joining us on today’s episode of Plugged in to Public Health. It’s been a pleasure hearing from Kassie Owens about her incredible journey from Iowa to Romania and the valuable insight she’s gained along the way. Kassie’s passion for health care equity and her commitment to community impact is truly inspiring. If you enjoyed today’s episode, please don’t forget to subscribe and share it with your friends and colleagues. You can learn more about the University of Iowa College of Public Health on Facebook. Our podcast is available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and SoundCloud. This episode was hosted and written by Lauren Lavin and edited and produced by Lauren Lavin. Have a suggestion for our team? You can reach us at cph-gradambassador.uiowa.edu. This episode is brought to you by the University of Iowa College of Public Health. Until next week, stay healthy, stay curious.