The Evidence-to-Impact Podcast – Details, episodes & analysis

We’re back! The Evidence-to-Impact Podcast is back with a new episode where we discuss The Adolescent Health Network (AHN) from Penn State PRO Wellness. This episode features a conversation with Dr. Deepa Sekhar, executive director of Penn State PRO Wellness, Victoria Smith, career coordinator at Hershey High School in the Derry Township School District, and two amazing 12th-grade students and past program participants, Sarah Anderson, and Mena Morsy.

The AHN is a program that connects health researchers with teens to get their feedback on research ideas, helps researchers design studies that are more relevant to adolescents, and gives students valuable experiential knowledge of health careers and research in general. This program is a great way to ensure your research is relevant to teens and their health needs. In addition to providing feedback on research ideas, teens can also help with study design, recruitment, and dissemination strategies. 

We're closing out this semester's season with a conversation about prevention and partnerships. We focus on a discussion between a long-standing collaborative relationship between Penn State and the Pennsylvania Commonwealth government, which targets interventions and prevention work targeted towards youth and families. Our episode covers a wide span of topics, including why prevention and implementation work are difficult, but critical; the changes that happen when there's a political transition, and much more.

We spoke to Janet Welsh, PhD, Research Professor at the Edna Bennett Pierce Prevention Center, and the Principal Investigator of the Evidence-based Prevention Intervention and Support program (EPIS) and SPEP™ (Standardized Program Evaluation Protocol) at Penn State, and Geoff Kolchin, Deputy Director of Unit of Violence Prevention Initiatives in the Office of Justice Programs at the Pennsylvania Commission on Crime and Delinquency (PCCD), about their decades long collaboration between EPIS and PCCD.

Resources and Additional Information

• Wrong Pocket Problem
• PAYS Reports

The transcript is available here.

For this month's episode, we explore a topic that we have wanted to cover for some time: unemployment and the pandemic labor market.

As the nation begins to "reopen" and the economy begins shifting, many states have begun ending pandemic-era unemployment insurance benefits. For many, unemployment insurance was the only thing keeping them afloat following the unprecedented unemployment crisis at the beginning of the pandemic. And yet, despite the unbelievable numbers of unemployed workers in our country, the stigma of receiving unemployment insurance persists. We asked ourselves why, in a time of tremendous health and economic crisis, are we giving folks who need help a hard time? We know that research shows that many families and individuals are still out of work and struggling to afford adequate food and pay mortgages or rent. Like other topics we covered - childcare and food insecurity, for example - the pandemic has made it abundantly clear that our country's systems are unsustainable and not enough to support the financial needs of families and individuals.

To debunk some of the concerns and myths of unemployment and dive into the shifting economy, we spoke to Sarah Damaske, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Labor and Employment Relations, Sociology and Women's Studies at Penn State and Associate Director of the Population Research Institute (PRI), and Mark Price, Ph.D., Associate Director of Research at the Pennsylvania State Education Association (PSEA). We discussed the stigma of experiencing unemployment or receiving unemployment insurance, how and why men and women experience unemployment differently, wage stagnation in the education sector, and more.

We encourage listeners to also check out Sarah's new book, The Tolls of Uncertainty: How Privilege and the Guilt Gap Shape Unemployment in America. While it is not required reading for this episode, it does paint a picture of pre-pandemic unemployment and provides salient policy recommendations to our unemployment system.

Episode Resources and Notes

• Sarah's new book, The Tolls of Uncertainty: How Privilege and the Guilt Gap Shape Unemployment in America, is out now. Buy it through Princeton University Press or on Amazon.
• Sarah and Mark mention the work of Kathryn Edwards, an economist at the Rand Corporation.
• Sarah mentions the Great Depression-era photographs by Dorothea Lange as inspiration for her book. You can find more of Dorothea Lange's work here.

The transcript for this episode is available here.

For this month's episode, we examined how the pandemic has revealed the "hidden crisis" of food insecurity throughout Pennsylvania and the rest of the country.

According to the U.S. Office of Disease Prevention and Health Promotion, food insecurity is defined as the disruption of food intake or eating patterns because of lack of money or other resources. For example, this could mean cutting down on the number of meals or changing the types of food that you eat to save money.

Since the beginning of the pandemic, the issue of food insecurity moved to the forefront as many people lost their jobs, schools went virtual and scrambled to set up school lunch pickups, supply chains stumbled, and food banks and community refrigerators flooded with people seeking food to feed their families. While we would argue that food insecurity was never a "hidden crisis," the pandemic worsened it for many children and families.

We spoke to Muzi Na, Ph.D., M.H.S., Assistant Professor of Nutritional Sciences and the Broadhurst Career Development Professor for the Study of Health Promotion and Disease Prevention at Penn State University, and Vonda Ramp, M.S., R.D., State Director of Child Nutrition Programs at the Division of Food and Nutrition in the Bureau of Budget and Fiscal Management within the Pennsylvania Department of Education (PA DOE), about who has been impacted by food insecurity and what is being done to help people access healthy food in their communities.

Episode Resources and Notes

• SSRI "Insights from the Experts" COVID-19 Blog Series: Food insecurity in Pennsylvania during the COVID-19 pandemic: Addressing immediate concerns and opportunities for the future
• JAMA Network Open: Disparities in Diet Quality in School-Age Children—Opportunities and Challenges

Dr. Na discusses something called the 24-hour recall method following a question about how to measure the nutritional and health concerns related to food insecurity. According to the National Institutes of Health, the 24-hour dietary recall method is a structured interview intended to capture detailed information about all foods and beverages (and possibly consumed by the respondent in the past 24 hours, most commonly, from midnight to midnight the previous day.

Ms. Ramp references how the PA DOE has applied for over 80+ U.S. Department of Agriculture child nutrition program waivers since the pandemic began. At this time, the PA DOE has applied to over 90 waivers.

The transcript for this episode is available here.

This month, we return to our Pandemic Perspective series and explore the state of the childcare system in Pennsylvania during the pandemic. We discuss the challenges and opportunities to funding, access, and quality for the childcare system.

We spoke to Karen Grimm-Thomas, Director of External Relations at the Pennsylvania Office of Child Development and Early Learning (OCDEL), and Philip Sirinides, Associate Professor of Education in the School of Behavioral Sciences and Education and Director of the Institute of State and Regional Affairs (ISRA) at Penn State Harrisburg, about the impact that the pandemic has had on childcare providers and families throughout Pennsylvania. OCDEL is a collaborative effort between the Pennsylvania Department of Education and the Pennsylvania Department of Human Services that focuses on creating opportunities for the commonwealth's youngest citizens to develop and learn to their fullest potential. The Institute of State and Regional Affairs leverages Penn State's unbiased data expertise and the resources to provide multifaceted data and research support services to partners in government and the private sector.

Episode Resources

• ISRA's Report on the Impact of COVID-19 on Pennsylvania Child Care
• ISRA's Report on the Cost of Childcare in Pennsylvania
• Breakdown About OCDEL's COVID-19 Funding

The transcript for this episode is available here.

This month, we are taking a break from our Pandemic Perspective series to examine an existing working relationship between academia and government. Since we talk a lot on this podcast about how the research community and government partners or policymakers can work together more effectively, it made sense for us to dig into an existing policy collaboration between the two groups.

For our March episode, we explore the Pennsylvania Coordinated Medication-Assisted Treatment Program, or PacMAT, which builds evidence-based medication-assisted treatment (MAT) programs for Pennsylvanians suffering from opioid use disorder. Currently, there are 14 PacMAT centers throughout Pennsylvania that utilize a hub-and-spoke model. PacMAT's hub-and-spoke model has an addiction specialist physician at the center as the hub, providing expert guidance and support to primary care physicians in rural and underserved areas of the state. The primary care physicians, who serve as the spokes, provide the direct-patient care and includes prescribing MAT, which is the gold standard for opioid use disorder treatment. PacMAT stemmed from a significant need throughout Pennsylvania for physicians who had 1) received a DEA (U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration) waiver for prescribing MAT to patients living with opioid use disorder, and 2) felt comfortable enough to even prescribe MAT to their patients.

We spoke with Laura Fassbender, executive advisor in the Office of the Secretary at the Pennsylvania Department of Health, and Max Crowley, Associate Professor of Human Development and Family Studies and the director of the Evidence-to-Impact Collaborative at Penn State University, about the challenges and successes behind developing the interdisciplinary architecture for PacMAT.

If you or someone you know is struggling with a substance use disorder, you can visit SAMHSA's website for more information. If you enjoyed this episode about PacMAT and combatting the opioid crisis, check out our episode about tackling the stigma of the opioid epidemic with Glenn Sterner and Steve Forzato.

Note: This episode was recorded in early February 2021. Laura Fassbender has since left the Pennsylvania Department of Health and currently serves as the Vice President of Primary Care and Public Health Policy at the Wright Center for Community Health.

The transcript for this episode is available here.

This month's episodes feature everything but the kitchen sink! We're tackling how government, primarily at the local and state levels, transitioned to remote work, unemployment and the recession, the messaging behind school closings/mask wearing, the 2020 Election, COVID-19 vaccines distribution, and everything in between.

As part of our new series, The Pandemic Perspective, we spoke with Commissioner Mike Pipe, Centre County Chair of the Board of Commissioners and Co-Chair of the Election Board of Centre County, and Dr. Chris Witko, Associate Director of the School of Public Policy and Professor of Public Policy and Political Science at Penn State University. This episode is the second episode of a two-part episode about this topic. Listen to Part 1 here.

Please note that this episode was recorded in early December 2020.

Resources/Additional Links for this Episode

• Business Insider: Unemployment surged to 14.7% in April as the US lost a record 20.5 million jobs
• U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics: Ability to work from home: evidence from two surveys and implications for the labor market in the COVID-19 pandemic
• ProPublica: What Coronavirus Job Losses Reveal About Racism in America
• NPR: Pandemic Forces More Women To Leave The Workforce
• Pew Research Center: Economic Fallout From COVID-19 Continues To Hit Lower-Income Americans the Hardest
• Newsy/Ipsos: Newsy/Ipsos Poll Finds Broad Support For National Mask Mandate
• Pew Research Center: More Americans say they are regularly wearing masks in stores and other businesses
• The Hill: Restaurant group calls on governors to make closing indoor dining 'a last option'
• WITF: The dispute over the Wolf administration’s handling of coronavirus in nursing homes, explained
• New York Times: More Than One-Third of U.S. Coronavirus Deaths Are Linked to Nursing Homes

The Evidence-to-Impact Collaborative Podcast's new series, The Pandemic Perspective, examines how the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic and various aspects of our society, institutions, and other systems have collided, changed, and even collapsed in the last nine months.

The transcript for this episode is available here.

This month's two part (!) episode features everything but the kitchen sink! We're tackling how government, primarily at the local and state levels, transitioned to remote work, unemployment and the recession, the messaging behind school closings/mask wearing, the 2020 Election, COVID-19 vaccines distribution, and everything in between.

For the second episode of our new series, The Pandemic Perspective, we spoke with Commissioner Mike Pipe, Centre County Chair of the Board of Commissioners and Co-Chair of the Election Board of Centre County, and Dr. Chris Witko, Associate Director of the School of Public Policy and Professor of Public Policy and Political Science at Penn State University. This episode is broken into two parts - we had a lot to talk about! - and will be released biweekly.

Please note that this episode was recorded in early December 2020.

Resources/Additional Links for this Episode

• Business Insider: Unemployment surged to 14.7% in April as the US lost a record 20.5 million jobs
• U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics: Ability to work from home: evidence from two surveys and implications for the labor market in the COVID-19 pandemic
• ProPublica: What Coronavirus Job Losses Reveal About Racism in America
• NPR: Pandemic Forces More Women To Leave The Workforce
• Pew Research Center: Economic Fallout From COVID-19 Continues To Hit Lower-Income Americans the Hardest
• Newsy/Ipsos: Newsy/Ipsos Poll Finds Broad Support For National Mask Mandate
• Pew Research Center: More Americans say they are regularly wearing masks in stores and other businesses
• The Hill: Restaurant group calls on governors to make closing indoor dining 'a last option'
• WITF: The dispute over the Wolf administration’s handling of coronavirus in nursing homes, explained
• New York Times: More Than One-Third of U.S. Coronavirus Deaths Are Linked to Nursing Homes

The Evidence-to-Impact Collaborative Podcast's new series, The Pandemic Perspective, examines how the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic and various aspects of our society, institutions, and other systems have collided, changed, and even collapsed in the last nine months.

The transcript for this episode is available here.

The Evidence-to-Impact Collaborative Podcast is offering a new series called The Pandemic Perspective, where we examine how the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic and various aspects of our society, institutions, and other systems have collided, changed, and even collapsed in the last nine months.

For the first episode of this series, we spoke with three experts about how the delivery of educational services for children with disabilities and the greater education system has changed since the beginning of the year, as well as how we can incorporate lessons learned into the future. The discussion stems from a May 2020 blog post from the Social Science Research Institute’s “Insights from the Experts” COVID-19 blog series.

Our guests include Carole Clancy, Director of the Bureau of Special Education for the Pennsylvania Department of Education; Paul Morgan, Professor of Education and Demography in the Department of Education Policy Studies and Director of the Center for Educational Disparities Research (CEDR) at Penn State; and Adrienne Woods, CEDR Postdoctoral Research Scholar in the Department of Education Policy Studies at Penn State.

Resources for Teachers, Families, and School Administrators

• Pennsylvania Department of Education (PDE)
• Bureau of Special Education for the Pennsylvania Department of Education
• Pennsylvania Training and Technical Assistance Network (PaTTAN)
• Council for Exceptional Children
• National Center for Learning Disabilities

Transcript for the episode is available here.

In this month's episode, we spoke to Alexis Santos, PhD, Assistant Professor of Human Development and Family Studies at Penn State, and David Saunders, Director of the Office of Health Equity for the Pennsylvania Department of Health, about different disparities throughout the Pennsylvania Commonwealth and how the lack of good data impacts what we understand about poverty and health inequities. The discussion stems from a project between Penn State's Administrative Data Accelerator and Office of Health Equity which examined associations between socioeconomic characteristics of the counties of Pennsylvania and life expectancy. Interestingly, those associations can potentially help to address disparities across the state through policy mechanisms.

According to the U.S. Office of Disease Prevention and Health Promotion's website, the phrase "social determinants of health" are conditions in the environments in which people are born, live, learn, work, play, worship, and age that affect a wide range of health, functioning, and quality-of-life outcomes and risks. Conditions (e.g., social, economic, and physical) in these various environments and settings (e.g., school, church, workplace, and neighborhood) have been referred to as "place."

Note: This episode was recorded prior to the outbreak of COVID-19 and does not address current circumstances, but the issues discussed are undoubtedly exacerbated due to the conditions of the pandemic. For clarification, Penn State's Administrative Data Accelerator is an infrastructure of the Evidence-to-Impact Collaborative at Penn State, which specializes in the acquisition, linkage and responsive use of often sensitive administrative data for research purposes—coming from both government, industry or other sources

Transcript is available here.