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Beginning in 2022-2023 Citi training will be required in IHS 5447 and IHS 5520 to help prepare MIHS students who want to submit an IRB in preparation for their capstone impact project.

What and Why CITI Training?

All MIHS students will be required to complete some CITI Training in preparation for your Capstone Impact Project. Why? Because you may want to survey patients/participants, gather data, etc. and in order to do that, you will need IRB approval (links to OHIO's IRB information page).

All studies that involve humans are potentially subject to federal government regulations. This includes everything from clinical trials to surveys, interviews, and observation. Any research -- including masters and doctoral projects -- that calls for participation by people must be reviewed and approved by the Institutional Review Board (IRB) before the project can begin. All researchers who conduct human subjects research must complete the required CITI training.

As defined by your program:

Each student will be assigned a faculty mentor from each certificate that the student selected for their degree, and together they will formulate an impact project. This impact project is designed to best meet the needs of each individual student and the populations which they serve, and therefore is unique and applicable to their professional goals. This capstone incorporates knowledge from the core courses and the certificates, which is a culminating, encompassing, and impactful project.

This project represents a practical application of understanding of coursework and selected certificates and will include the following elements: need/rationale, plan for implementation, and sustainability. Students will also present their project.

The Process: (Could consider a visual)

1. Based on the courses you have taken so far and where you want to work, you need to create an impact project that reflects your population and/or field of focus. An impact project defines a problem (or need) and demonstrates how it can be solved via a plan for implementation.
   • What problems or needs have you noticed? Are there trends or social determinants of health that strike you?
2. You will need to work with your mentors to establish a topic of focus. Please see certificate tabs for topic ideas and this will likely mean you will have to do some pre-searching to get ideas. (Pre-searching and narrowing topic flow chart - opens in another window)
3. Once you have a topic, you can start thinking about gathering evidence (rationale to support the need). Under the Research & Certificate-Specific Resources tab, you will find research tips, suggestions, and more!
   • Please schedule an appointment with Hanna Schmillen for research-gathering insight specific to your topic.
   • Hanna strongly suggests you look into utilizing a reference manager, like Zotero, to organize and cite your references of evidence.
4. Once you have some understanding of the need (problem), start thinking about the next steps: implementation.Think of it as a program proposal or a policy change. If you were to really make a change to solve the problem, what would that look like?
   • What can be done to solve this problem? What tools will you need? Who/what would be involved if you were to actually do this? How could this implementation be sustainable?
   • Remember, you should have some evidence to back this up. So what kind of evidence do you want to gather? Will you be interviewing people? Do you need data, what kinds? (Remember, your CITI training and IRB requirements.)
5. Now you have your problem, you have evidence to why it's a problem, you have an idea of how you will implement it and some evidence to why that approach of implementation makes sense. The last piece to think about is the sustainability or the impact.
   • What would be the result? What would you hope to see short-term and long-term?
6. Now you have all of the pieces, you start bring it all together. You will summarize and string together research articles, data, and evidence from a variety of resources to describe the problem, your suggested implementation, and it's sustainability. Weave your audience through the evidence to your problem through the implementation plan and to the outcome. See my synthesizing and writing tips here.
7. Then present! See my presentation tips here.