The Minnesota Department of Health is the state-wide institution tasked with improving the health of Minnesotans. There are still county-level health departments, but MDH often focuses on state-wide policies and patterns.

MDH operates on a simple guiding mission which is: “Protecting, maintaining and improving the health of all Minnesotans.” Their broader vision is “for health equity in Minnesota, where all communities are thriving, and all people have what they need to be healthy.

According to the MDH, “the Minnesota Department of Health's Injury and Violence Prevention Section (IVPS) supports programs that help reduce the risk of injury and violence. Its staff includes epidemiologists, research scientists, program coordinators, prevention specialists, and administrative support.”

During my time at MDH in summer 2019, I worked on many different projects. Over the summer I mapped Naloxone Distribution pharmacies, mapped alcohol outlet distribution and accidentally created a “Find your nearest bar” feature, wrote data briefs on various subjects, and worked extensively on a project which focused on "suicides from high places.”

Suicide is one a major focus at MDH and within the IVPS because suicide is the eighth leading cause of death in Minnesota. In 2017, 783 Minnesotans died by suicide, which is higher than the national average.

Suicide is a particularly difficult subject to approach due to stigma and because while it has a great impact on the health of a population, the causes of suicide are often complicated and not easily addressed with a single public health intervention.

My most significant project was on suicides from high places (bridges, parking garages, tall buildings, highways etc.) The nature of my project was intense and sensitive in nature, and the deliverables that I made are not yet public information.

Anyone who dies in Minnesota is assigned a certain code on their death certificate which indicates cause of death. I was given a list of suicides with codes that could suggest fall from a high place as a manner of suicide.

Using the information from the National Violent Death Reporting System and REDCap, which are both softwares used by MDH to record sensitive data, I was able to find the address of each suicide location. The most disturbing and taxing part of this project was when I had to go on google maps and pinpoint the exact point and geocode the exact location.

Using this information, I was able to make a series of maps and categorize the locations by ‘type.’ This helped me understand what types of locations were being used to commit suicides. My data showed that certain bridges appeared to be serious hot-spots in a way that concerned the MDH, MN Department of Transportation and the University of Minnesota.

In all honesty, this was not an enjoyable project. It was hard to spend eight-hour days reading the case files of individuals who committed suicide and finding the exact location on google maps. It was hard to separate the data entries from the human lives that I was analyzing. In the end, I was glad that I found this task difficult, because it meant that I was not numb to the suffering and pain of others, despite the magnitude of what I was looking at every day. Each entry made me sad but knowing that this project would help inform real changes, like barriers on bridges or shifted night security patrols, helped me work through it.

In all honesty, I am not sure whether this project has moved forward. It is frustrating to know that my work might not have helped implement the changes I thought it would. However, MDH is a huge, governmental institution and there are many different competing priorities. This internship helped me realize that there are many different roles to play in public health, and little things like individual maps, data entry and basic analysis all help contribute to the larger mission of maintaining and promoting the health of Minnesotan residents.