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Jenna Upshaw: Committed to health promotion and outreach
By Cheryl Bell
Jenna Upshaw is joining the Faculty of Dentistry in September as its first community engagement and outreach coordinator.
She brings to the role a great interest and experience in public health. She is also committed to health promotion and to working with underrepresented populations and remote communities to improve their access to quality health care.
“The Faculty of Dentistry does amazing community outreach,” says Prof. Shauna Hachey, “however, our programs typically work in silos.”
Together with Dr. Ferne Kraglund, Hachey is one of the leads of the oral health care outreach pillar in the Faculty’s strategic plan, which led to the creation of the new role.
“We need someone who will oversee all of the outreach programs and ensure we are meeting our mission and vision as well as the needs of the communities we serve,” adds Hachey. “Jenna’s role will enable our Faculty to gather the evidence that will help us to fund and expand our work.”
Jenna’s new role will span helping to develop the Faculty’s outreach activities, community engagement, health promotion and policy, and the recruitment of students from priority groups.
MEET JENNA
Jenna completed the Transition Year Program at Dalhousie, a one-year program that helps Indigenous and Black students prepare for university life, anticipating that her next step would be nursing. When she discovered that she was pregnant, however, she felt that working shifts would not be compatible with raising a young child.
A careers counsellor at Dal helped Jenna to explore some alternative programs and, she says, they “landed on” health promotion, a subject in which she now holds a BSc after graduating in 2020.
Jenna admits that she didn’t truly have a clear idea of what health promotion was until her first class, which she describes as “mind-blowing”.
“Health promotion looks at how social determinants affect your health,” she says. “It was looking at health through a social lens and seeing how income, race, housing conditions, and policies shape our health. I definitely made the right choice.”
Jenna’s internship with the Nova Scotia Health public engagement team enabled her to gain experience of going out into the community to listen, answer questions, and help identify needs and barriers. “I look at people differently now,” she says. “I look at their circumstances. I get it.”
Jenna Upshaw, the Faculty of Dentistry’s new community engagement and outreach coordinator.
THE NEXT STEP
Jenna has been working as a career development practitioner with a Nova Scotia Works employment centre. She didn’t anticipate that her next step would be with an educational institution, partly because she couldn’t see how health promotion would fit into a role there.
But when she spotted the job advertised and read the various components of the position, she could see it was a good fit with her goals. “I knew immediately that this was the exact role and the type of work I wanted to be a part of,” she says.
Jenna is now looking forward to incorporating health promotion in her new role and plans to start by getting familiar with the people and the different facilities. She will visit the Faculty’s different outreach clinics to see how they operate and speak with the people who work there. She is also excited about building relationships with underrepresented priority groups and helping them overcome their barriers to health care.
It’s a new role for the Faculty as well as for Jenna and it is sure to evolve over time as she becomes familiar with the Faculty’s aims and outreach clinics. But even at this early stage, Jenna can say with confidence: “This role makes sense to me and I’m looking forward to being back at Dal, where I had such a positive experience as a student.”
