NNLM Discovery | "Outbreak!" (Audio Described Version)

What do Zombies and a Victorian-era museum featuring restraints as mental health tools have to do with public health education?
On this episode of the NNLM Discovery podcast, Region 7’s associate director, Jessica Kilham, shares how NNLM is supporting “Outbreak,” a summer program at the Public Health Museum in Tewksbury, MA that teaches high school students about public health. The final project for the week is an outbreak simulation for a zombie apocalypse!
You can view a short video about the story here on the NLM RUclips Channel.
The NNLM is the outreach arm of the National Library of Medicine with the mission to advance the progress of medicine and improve the public health by providing all U.S. health professionals with equal access to biomedical information and improving the public's access to information to enable them to make informed decisions about their health. The seven Health Sciences Libraries function as the Regional Medical Library (RML) for their respective region, with Region 7 consisting of: Connecticut, Massachusetts, Maine, New Hampshire, New York, Rhode Island and Vermont. To learn more about Region 7 visit: www.nnlm.gov/about/regions/reg....
All of the artwork for this podcast series has been created with a generative AI image-to-image tool! The prompt for this episode was to change a photo of the Tewksbury hospital “into a colorful oil painting.”
Video Transcript:
[Dr. Al DeMaria]
Welcome to the Public Health Museum at the Tewksbury Hospital. It was built in 1895, and we're very fortunate to have it as space for our museum. The dream of the founders of this museum was to have a place where people could learn about public health, because we know the general public knows very little.
[Sarah Levin-Lederer]
So public health is community health. So it's going to the doctor, but it's also this idea of how we improve the health for everybody. Making sure that water is safe, making sure that restaurants are safe, making sure that people get immunizations, their vaccinations. It's also making sure that people are informed.
[Dr. Al DeMaria]
Outbreak is a summer program that started in 2013 as an experiment to bring high school students in and teach them about public health. Because nobody hears about public health until they go to public health school. And it's kind of too late.
[Teri Clover]
I actually didn't know anything about public health before coming to Outbreak. It completely changed my career path. Al kind of opens up Outbreak every year with a quote that has stuck with me. “Doctors have the ability to change their patient’s lives, and public health has the ability to change the world.” So that's when I started thinking public health.
[Sarah Levin-Lederer]
Teri was somebody who liked it so much, who was so invested in it. She studied public health and she's working in the field now.
[Teri Clover]
I currently work for Cambridge Health Alliance, so I'm the planning and operations coordinator for the Health and Medical Coordinating Coalitions in Region 4 AB. I do emergency preparedness and management for the Metro Boston area. You know, when I signed up for this program, I definitely did not think that it was going to completely impact my career and my life choices.
[Teri Clover[
And it did.
[Sarah Levin-Lederer] Outbreak has had three grants with NNLM and the first couple of years it was really about transportation. It was about making sure that the kids could get here for free and also about supporting the ability for the students to go out and have field trips. In the third year, funding helped them transition to be virtual during the pandemic.
[Teri Clover] NLM, I cannot stress enough the impact it has. Part of our mission and our vision is to be equitable. We really, we want everyone to be introduced to public health and having that grant and making this program free for students allows that.
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