MPH Program in Health Services

Health Policy Capstone Project Handbook

Overview

The 2ndyear health policy capstone project is a major undertaking. It should be viewed as an opportunity for students 1) to work with a community setting or health-related agency of their choice, 2) to immerse themselves in solving a public policy problem, 3) to develop, expand and hone their analytic skills, and 4) to gain specialized, sophisticated experience in an area of particular interest. It is an individualized experience, a supervised component of the MPH curriculum that students can customize to meet their own learning and experiential goals.

Students can begin thinking about possible capstone projects at any time, but should plan to have a fairly well-formulated idea by the beginning of autumn quarter of the second year. Capstone projects can be crafted from a large range of venues. A minimum of 9 credit hours are required to conduct the project from conception and planning stages to the final oral and written presentations.

Students work closely with a capstone supervisory committee of two faculty members,

at least one of whom (the chair) must be a member of the graduate academic faculty. Ideally, at least one will be a Health Services faculty member affiliated with the health policy track or concentration. The composition of the capstone committee must be approved by the MPH Director during the first quarter of the capstone. The committee will assist in planning the project, monitoring progress, reviewing project-related documents and products, and participating in project evaluation and grading.

The capstone project places an emphasis on critical thinking, stakeholder analysis, and effective communication. Broadly, it meets:

Experiential Goals: To contribute to solving a community health problem in a meaningful, effective, and culturally sensitive fashion; specifically,

  • To work to solve a public policy problem.
  • To find and apply evidence-based solutions to a defined policy problem.
  • To work productively with other people and to develop successful partnerships and solutions.
  • To explore problem-solving methods in the contexts of specific policy issues.
  • To understand the organizational, political, economic, and social contexts that can promote or constrain public policy interventions.

Academic Goals: Both the health policy class work and the capstone project are structured to assure that students achieve core public health competencies in such skill areas as assessment, communication, policy development, and cultural awareness. General academic goals for the capstone project are:

  • To develop advanced public health assessment and problem-solving skills.
  • To develop comprehensive knowledge in an area or areas of special interest.
  • To evaluate the successes and weaknesses of the project through either formal evaluation and analysis or reflection.
  • To hone communication skills and use them to summarize findings in professional-quality written and oral presentations.

The capstone project is an individualized opportunity to apply and extend the health policy skills learned in other settings, develop new skills, expand professional networks, and gain specialized knowledge that can be used to advance the student’s career and effectiveness in health policy. Indeed, the experience, contacts, skills, and work products of the capstone project can be viewed as important components of each student’s “portfolio” and as major assets in the student’s resume.

What is a Capstone Project?

The capstone project is a year-long activity. Many students will work with a community organization or public health or health policy agency, but it is not required. You will work to a) identify and contribute to the solution of a public health problem, and b) summarize, present, and evaluate this effort. Your criteria for choosing a capstone project are that it should:

  1. Address a need and/or have direct, practical value to a community organization, a public health agency, or other health policy entity.
  1. Involve an identifiable activity (or set of activities) with a clear endpoint and produce a specific product that can be described in detail and evaluated formally or through reflection. It is not sufficient to have an “experience”—that is, help with, work in, observe, or staff a public health project. The capstone project must result in a product that the student can point to as her/his own. Examples of products include:
  • An implementation plan for a public health program
  • An evaluation (report)
  • A needs assessment (report)
  • A policy analysis
  • Policy development
  • Proposed legislation
  1. Provide an opportunity to apply and extend specific public health skills, knowledge, and experience in an area of special interest to the student.
  1. Be relevant to improving the health of a community, advancing social justice, eliminating health disparities, or improving public health practice or policy.
  1. Be evidence-based. It is NOT sufficient just to DO something for the capstone project. You must build on—or place in the context of—what is known (i.e., “evidence”). It is poor practice to a) be unaware of the theory underpinning an intervention, b) “re-invent the wheel,” c) fail to apply the experiences of others in developing an intervention, or d) use methods and interventions that have been shown to be ineffectual. Therefore, project activities must be planned and based on the published literature and ad hoc research (e.g., talking to experienced public health professionals) that can inform you about relevant theory, experience, and evaluations.
  1. Include an evaluation or self-evaluation component (described below).
  1. Be summarized in a written report and orally in a rigorous, thoughtful, and professional manner.

Process and Timeline

The capstone project consists of four phases: 1) Planning, 2) Doing, 3) Evaluating and Reflecting, and 4) Summarizing and Presenting.

Planning the Project

You need to identify a project that meets your expectations, the program’s expectations, and is do-able. This is a process that can take weeks or months. It is good to start early, ideally in your first year. First, become clear about what kinds of projects, populations, or problems are of interest to you.

  • Are you interested in certain population groups, e.g., immigrants?
  • Are you interested in a specific problem area, e.g., reproductive health?
  • Do you want to work with a specific organization or type of organization (e.g., a rural health department)?
  • Do you want experience in a specific public policy challenge, e.g., developing a media campaign, conducting a program evaluation, or performing epidemiologic analysis?

Then, aggressively search for opportunities in your areas of interest. Use all of your resources to identify individuals, agencies, and opportunities related to your interests: personal contacts (faculty, colleagues, etc.), the web, print resources. Be active. Ask around. Call people. Arrange to meet with people to let them know your interests and your needs (i.e., doing a 2nd year project), and also your skills and ability to help. Often, a person with whom you meet will give you names of others to contact. Follow up on these leads. Do not be shy. If you cannot arrange a meeting, try to talk on the phone, or worst of all, via email. Be energetic and persistent in seeking out as many potential projects as possible.

At some point, you must decide which of the potential projects you wish to pursue. This is truly one of the hardest parts of the process for many of us. Usually, there is no perfect choice and no obvious front-runner. But waitingfor the perfect project can be disastrous. Many months later, you could be starting a project that should have been well underway. So please avail yourself of your advisers or other faculty if you find yourself stymied.

While you are selecting your capstone project, you should also be identifying a faculty member to be your primary adviser (chair)for its supervisory committee. This person should be someone with whom you feel comfortable and who has expertise in the area where you’ll be working. Although we prefer that you select a primary adviser from the Health Services policy faculty, you can choose someone else, provided that they are on the UW graduate faculty, have a faculty appointment in the School of Public Health (preferably in Health Services), and are willing to supervise the project.

In your second year, your primary project adviser is normally your program (academic) adviser as well. This faculty person can help you select a second UW faculty adviser

to be the second member of your capstone project supervisory committee. The second faculty adviser can be from almost any department or school at the UW.

Remaining questions on supervisory committee formation can be directed to .

When you have chosen your project, you must prepare and submit a 4-5 page proposal (see Appendix A), describing:

  • what you plan to do
  • why it is of importance
  • where and with whom you will be doing it
  • how you plan to go about doing it
  • what you hope to get out of the experience

At this stage, we are not expecting a comprehensive background analysis, literature search, or detailed work plan, but those are important to prepare as soon into the project as possible. The work plan helps you and your advisers to plan and track your activities and is good practice in orienting yourself to both the local context of your project and the relevant scientific evidence base (both theory and experience) for what you plan to do. Appendix E contains a form that you might find useful to organize your background research about the community, organization, or agency involved in your work. A synthesis of your background research will be part of your final written report and is described in more detail in Appendix B.

One copy of your proposal should be given to the faculty advisers you have selected and one copy should be submitted to the MPH program office for general review. (Email it to ). Once the proposal has been approved, a signed copy should be submitted to the MPH program office.

An University of Washington Human Subjects application must be submitted for many projects.Your faculty advisers should be able to tell you whether a Human Subjects application is necessary for yours. If it is needed, the Human Subjects Review (IRB) process must be completed before any actual research is undertaken. Because this process is often lengthy, it is imperative that you determine very early in the planning process if a Human Subjects application is needed.

Conducting the Project

This phase involves the actual conduct of your project. The details will vary; these may involve political action, data analysis, evaluation, program planning, program implementation—it depends on the purpose of your particular project. As a general guide, the work involved should amount to about 180-240 hours, or 9-12 hours per week during Autumn and Winter quarters, i.e., 3 credits per quarter (HSERV 599). You will also register for 3 credits in Spring quarter to work on the Evaluation and Presentation components. This represents simply the program’s minimal requirement. You may spend more time on this project. During this time, you should meet with your faculty adviser at least twice per quarter. It is important that the whole committee (faculty adviser, second faculty member, and student) meet together at least once a quarter, and more if helpful or needed. If you are doing an international project, you will likely need to complete all of your fieldwork in the summer between your first and second years. (If completing your fieldwork in the summer, there is usually no need to register and pay tuition to be eligible to work on the project; you may register for these credits in the ensuing academic year.)

Evaluation and Reflection

Nothing that we do is perfect and we can all learn from our mistakes as well as our successes. Therefore, a critical aspect of the capstone project is a thoughtful evaluation. Some projects may involve a structured, formal evaluation, which will help provide information on the success of the project. In addition, we expect each student to reflect and comment on the experience, answering the questions below. It may be helpful to keep a journal or log to record and monitor your progress, difficulties, victories, and impressions.

  • What worked and what did not?
  • What would you do differently if you could do it over?
  • Did you meet your individual learning objectives?
  • What was most (and possibly least) valuable about the experience?
  • What did you learn about yourself from the project?

Summarizing and Presenting the Project

Although the capstone project should be an activity (informed by scholarly background research), an essential part of the process is to summarize (in written, oral, and poster media) what you accomplished. The development of good communication and presentation skills are important aspects of your training. Therefore, the faculty place great importance on the summarization and presentation of your capstone project.

The program will ask for two, and possibly four, summaries from you.

1. Written report: Aformal, professional, detailed, and comprehensive written report on what you did and what you learned. Generally, this report will be between 20 and 40 pages. A complete first draft of the report should be submitted to the supervisory committee five weeks before the end of the quarter in which the student plans to graduate (generally Spring Quarter). If agreeable with the members of the committee, you may submit drafts of sections of the report individually. The final report is due one week before the end of that quarter. (An outline for the report is given in Appendix B.)

2. Agency presentation: If you worked with an agency, asummary/presentation of your project for—and to—the agency in which you worked.The format of this presentation should be determined in discussions with your on-site colleagues. It is possible that a summary of the report above or the program presentation (described below) will be satisfactory. But the agency may instead want a more focused, or perhaps more community-oriented report, such as a presentation at a staff meeting,town meeting, hearing, etc. In any case, this needs to be negotiated early in the project.

3. Oral presentation: There may be an opportunity to give an oral presentationduring Spring Quarter, usually during the MPH seminar.

4. Poster presentation: Students are encouraged to produce poster presentations of their projects. These posters can be displayed at the time of the oral presentations/ Details and instructions on how to produce a poster presentation can be found at:

There are many guides available—at the UW, on the Web, or in books—to assist you in developing a poster, e.g., Kelliher GJ, Sachdeva, AK. How to present a scientific poster. J of Cancer Ed. 1996; 11(1):11-16.

Forms and Documents

To keep busy-work to a minimum -- and yet to provide a system for accountability, tracking, and feedback -- we want the following documents from you:

Document/ Milestone / Purpose / When Due / Submitted to / Description found in
Project proposal / To summarize the proposed project; to enable faculty to evaluate the project’s feasibility and adequacy, and to make suggestions for enhancing its quality. / By the fifth week of Autumn Quarter in the 2nd year / Faculty adviser and MPH program office / Appendix A
Human Subjects (IRB) application / To assure, when necessary, that Human Subjects protections are not infringed by the work undertaken in the project / Three months before you need to contact subjects or access identifiable data / Human Subjects Office (need signature of primary faculty adviser) /
Project written product / To give an accounting of the goals, background, methods, accomplishments, and implications of the project; to provide a vehicle for evaluation and reflection on the project’s strengths and weaknesses / By the end of the 9th week of Spring Quarter / Three copies: faculty adviser, faculty member, MPH program office (final version) / Appendix B
Project presentation / To share the goals, background, methods, accomplishments, and implications of the project in oral and poster formats / Generally, during last week of Spring Quarter / Faculty, classmates, invited guests / Appendix C
Project evaluation form / To provide a mechanism for the student and faculty committee members to provide constructive feedback to one another / Last week of Spring Quarter / Faculty committee members, MPH program office / Appendix D
Community/ organization background outline / To organize background information about the community and/or agency in which your capstone project is situated / At the onset, or before the project begins / For student’s own use / Appendix E

Timeline

Below is a suggested timeline for your capstone project activities. You are encouraged to begin early. There is a range of months for each of these activities, but they should precede more or less in sequence (e.g., you submit your proposal before you start the project itself). The black cells represent important targets or deadlines. A complete draft of the final report must be submitted to both faculty committee members at least five weeks before the last week of the quarter in which you plan to graduate.

Year 1 / Summer / Year 2
S / O / N / D / J / F / M / A / M / J / J / A / S / O / N / D / J / F / M / A / M
Think about what to do for your project
Research possibilities
Find a faculty adviser
Background research
Select a project/site
Submit proposal
Submit Human Subjects application
Conduct project
Prepare reports and presentations
Submit draft of report
Submit report
Oral presentation
Evaluation

Evaluation and Feedback

A formal monitoring system to ensure satisfactory progress will be based on continuing dialogue between the faculty committee members and the student. The faculty guide the student throughout the project, and they evaluate the quality of the final product.

Informal meetings among the student and faculty should occur at least twice a quarter to discuss progress and problems and to get informal feedback. The student may choose to meet with faculty committee members separately,depending on topics, needs, and logistical considerations. But at least one in-person meeting per quarter between the advisers and the student is usually expected. The two faculty should talk at least twice

per quarter to assure consonant expectations and perspectives, or at least to clarify these.

At the end of the Spring Quarter—during either the last week of the quarter or exam week—all three parties (student, faculty chair, and second faculty member) should complete a Capstone Evaluation Form (Appendix D) that will be shared with the others, with a copy going to the program files.