I had the great privilege of interviewing Dr. Kimberly Uyeda who is the director for Student Medical Services & Community Partnerships/Medi-Cal in the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD.) Dr. Uyeda’s work primarily consists of directly serving underserved populations through innovative school-community partnerships that will enhance their quality of health and their overall life. Dr. Kimberly Uyeda is a huge advocate for developing continuous quality improvement of healthcare for adolescent students who suffer from preventable medical conditions within the school district of South Los Angeles. One of Dr. Uyeda’s main goals is to effectively lower the rates of obesity, asthma, and other malicious conditions in (LAUSD) schools by implementing
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Uyeda began her career in the health field, she was always interested in lending a helping hand to those in need. Her interest to help would be fueled by her desire to improve the quality of health in local schools and communities within Los Angeles. Her interest in improving health conditions would soon be solidified as she began to focus and study pediatric medicine. She graduated from medical school at the University of California San Diego and completed her internship and residency at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Pediatrics. She would later go on to receive her master’s degree in Community Health Sciences at the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health. Dr. Uyeda has done various amounts of projects which include being the Principal Investigator of the Merck Childhood Asthma Network-sponsored asthma program in LAUSD, and being the co-investigator on the UCLA/RAND Healthy Adolescent Living Study, which focuses on obesity prevention in middle school youth. Through her various participation in research and projects she has developed a great understanding of the health challenges students face in their schools and has also developed a greater understanding on how to effectively address and solve the …show more content…
Some skills that a candidate must possess or develop based on Dr. Uyeda perspective are that the candidate must have a strong medical background (Pediatrics) to fully understand the medical issues that will be present within schools and what steps should be taken to solve them. The candidate should preferably have a master’s in Public Health to increase chances of getting hired and they must also understand Public Health. Dr. Uyeda said they must have this skill to “look at populations and understand their trends/history to effectively predict where certain medical conditions started and what exactly started them.” Once they have this skill to understand Public Health they can develop initiatives and programs to help reduce the conditions that cause students to develop health problems. Dr. Uyeda said they can proceed to help change the conditions by deciding what type of lunches are being served at schools and help develop a plan with physical education instructors to decide how many minutes should students be active for. Other important skill that Dr. Kimberly Uyeda mentioned were on the art of public speaking and the concept of collaboration/teamwork. These two last skills are fundamental to this job because it will either help facilitate your job or make it a constant
Uyeda began her career in the health field, she was always interested in lending a helping hand to those in need. Her interest to help would be fueled by her desire to improve the quality of health in local schools and communities within Los Angeles. Her interest in improving health conditions would soon be solidified as she began to focus and study pediatric medicine. She graduated from medical school at the University of California San Diego and completed her internship and residency at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Pediatrics. She would later go on to receive her master’s degree in Community Health Sciences at the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health. Dr. Uyeda has done various amounts of projects which include being the Principal Investigator of the Merck Childhood Asthma Network-sponsored asthma program in LAUSD, and being the co-investigator on the UCLA/RAND Healthy Adolescent Living Study, which focuses on obesity prevention in middle school youth. Through her various participation in research and projects she has developed a great understanding of the health challenges students face in their schools and has also developed a greater understanding on how to effectively address and solve the …show more content…
Some skills that a candidate must possess or develop based on Dr. Uyeda perspective are that the candidate must have a strong medical background (Pediatrics) to fully understand the medical issues that will be present within schools and what steps should be taken to solve them. The candidate should preferably have a master’s in Public Health to increase chances of getting hired and they must also understand Public Health. Dr. Uyeda said they must have this skill to “look at populations and understand their trends/history to effectively predict where certain medical conditions started and what exactly started them.” Once they have this skill to understand Public Health they can develop initiatives and programs to help reduce the conditions that cause students to develop health problems. Dr. Uyeda said they can proceed to help change the conditions by deciding what type of lunches are being served at schools and help develop a plan with physical education instructors to decide how many minutes should students be active for. Other important skill that Dr. Kimberly Uyeda mentioned were on the art of public speaking and the concept of collaboration/teamwork. These two last skills are fundamental to this job because it will either help facilitate your job or make it a constant