When she was in college, Patricia Drehobl, RN, MPH, knew she liked science and wanted to do meaningful work. After a summer spent as a student nurse’s aid, she looked at the nursing program and “liked everything about it.”

Drehobl worked in several settings, including a busy intensive care pediatric hospital in Chicago, where she discovered that she had a gift for teaching patients.

“I was good at explaining complicated tests, so I went back for a master’s in public health,” Drehobl said. “Nursing is a pathway. There are so many different things you can do after your basic program.”

Her pathway lead her to work as a health education specialist in the National Immunization program and then to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “The CDC is the epicenter for public health. It’s always challenging and stimulating work,” she
said.

“Epidemiology is the study of how and why diseases occur in populations. Much of the work of the CDC is applied epidemiology, the collecting of samples, delivering prophylactics, education and vaccinations — that’s where the rubber meets the road. We’re responding to changing events in the country and in health care.”

Since Sept. 11, Drehobl has worked in the terrorism preparedness and emergency response arena and took a lead role in training staff for the national smallpox vaccination campaign, where she was recognized for her outstanding contributions to nursing. Most recently, she has worked with the new Center for Health Marketing to establish stronger partnerships between the CDC and the American Nurses Association. “Nurses are our critical partners for delivering our education messages, so I’m excited to see a full-scale nursing initiative and the organizations working together. There was never a single entry point for nurses to work with the CDC before,” Drehobl said.

There are more than 100 nurses contributing their health care experience to CDC programs. While most don’t carry the word “nurse” in their titles, they are working “to prevent and intervene with infections, chronic diseases and injuries; promote healthy lifestyles, advocate for the disadvantaged and disabled; and address occupational/environmental health issues,” said Amy Collins, RN, MPH, CDR, USPHS, an epidemiologist with the National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion. “What is so delightful about the CDC is that you can have an expertise in a certain area, but it can be applied in so many ways.”

A research microbiologist, nursing was a second career for Collins. Stationed overseas with her husband who was in the Navy, she volunteered for a rescue squad, became an emergency medical technician and then a nurse.

Wide-ranging projects
In her five years at the CDC, Collins has worked on a national children’s study that combines data on a variety of diseases, conditions and environmental factors; helped with infection control in the SARS outbreak in Taiwan and the displaced people of Indonesia after the tsunami in December; and delivered clinical emergency care to people in Florida after a series of hurricanes last year.

“I’ve been able to expand my skill set across different projects,” she said. “What we do impacts individuals all the way up to communities. I’m learning new things and applying them differently — that’s how we advance and make a better, healthier world.”

For John Moore, Ph.D., RN, the focus is on the advancement of adolescent health. His job as a health scientist with the National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion is to pull research from many areas to develop a comprehensive approach to health for children age 11 to 19 already learned and are adding to them to have one education program,” he said. “The people I work with are incredible and I didn’t expect that. I thought it would be a bunch of bureaucrats who didn’t care that much, but these people are really invested in what they do.”

Moore planned to be an English teacher when he graduated from college, but there was a glut of teachers on the market, so his mother, a nurse, suggested he apply for a job in a nursing home.

“I fell in love with doing patient care and went back to school to become a nurse,” he said.

While he was working in a hospital, Moore enrolled in a patient education program.

“I feel so lucky to have found a job that combines my interest in education and my nursing skills. It’s most satisfying and I’m learning about all kinds of programs that I didn’t know existed,” he said.

Being in a learning environment is what Julie Choudhuri, RN, MSPH, likes best about her CDC job. Choudhuri is an epidemiologist in the Center for Infectious Diseases and works with food-borne enteric illnesses.

“I work with people from all kinds of educational backgrounds — veterinarians, scientists, doctors and nurses — and we’re exposed to the latest findings about all the big, national outbreaks,” Choudhuri said.

One of Choudhuri’s goals is to introduce geographic information systems software within her branch. That would allow her to map health data temporally and spatially.

“We could plot an outbreak to see where the hot spots are, what caused it and intervene, as well as validate a hypothesis for what may have started it,” she said.

On the front lines
Joyce A. Goff, BSN, M.Ed., MHL, is a captain in the U.S. Public Health Service and a health education specialist with the CDC National Immunization Program. Her job is to respond to and investigate preventable disease issues and public concerns about vaccine safety and efficacy.

Goff recently established (and achieved certification through the ANCC) the first CDC continuing education programs for nurses. “These are the people who are on the front lines carrying out our mission. We had a training component for doctors, so
why not one for nurses?”

Goff is director of continuing nurse education at the CDC. Being a nurse and part of the Public Health Service taught her to be a “cando” type of person and not to be choosy about assignments. When asked if she’d like to work in Puerto Rico, Gofff was sent the next day to set up a clinic for Haitian and Cuban refugees and found it an exciting experience. She has stepped out of her cultural and language comfort zone to help control the spread of polio in villages in India and to educate Africans about HIV/AIDS.

“The question I often ask myself is ‘are things any better as a result of your being there?’ I do believe in public health for the greater good,” Goff said.