Monongahela Valley Association of Health Centers, Inc. (MVA), is a private, non-profit West Virginia Corporation that has been providing quality health care to the residents of Marion, Monongalia, Harrison, Taylor, and Wetzel counties since 1958. MVAowns and operates Fairmont Clinic, Shinnston Medical Center, the East Fairmont and North Marion High School Wellness Centers, and a Medicare-certified Home Health Agency. The mission of MVA is to provide quality health care, at a reasonable cost, to all residents of its service area. The vision of MVA is to be the area’s top quality provider of comprehensive primary health care services. MVA strives to provide the highest quality patient care possible, provide services to meet all the health care needs of the service area residents, and redesign the delivery of health care to provide quality health care in the most timely and cost-effective manner possible.
Internship Relevance:
This internship is relevant to marketing and public relations in that it is an opportunity to apply knowledge in many areas of marketing and public relations. The internship will give you an opportunity to apply some of the skills that you have already learned in previous classes and programs. Projects that will be provided to you in the internship will give you a chance to observe many areas of marketing first-hand, including internal and external relations at the clinic. By viewing how our healthcare system operates will provide you with the opportunity to tailor a marketing strategy for our organization to better serve our patients and community, as well as extend our outreach to potential patients in our service area.
Internship Objectives:
The hopes for this internship are that it will provide you with fundamental and experiential knowledge for your future career goals in marketing and/or public relations. Much of the knowledge acquired through experience is the best kind for understanding the types of criteria that will be needed to develop marketing plans and strategies. Hopefully, the administrative staff at MVA will be able to provide you with personal experiences and knowledge pertaining to marketing and public relations that you will be able to apply yourself. These connections will also be useful to you for recommendation purposes, as well. The main objective of the internship is to provide you with confidence in your own abilities and to prepare you for the career of your choice.
Some of the major internship projects include, but are not limited to:
1.) Familiarize/Research Facility/General Information
- Social Media: Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, etc.
- Brochures: Walk-In Clinic Usage
- Relay for Life: Need Timeline
- Website: “Press Page”
- Take photos of clinic and signs to review and make changes
2.) Advertising/Signs/Branding
- Departmental Advertising: Patient Room Info
- New Signs: directing patients to pharmacy, optical, etc./placement
3.) Event Planning
- Health Fair: May 20th
- Relay for Life: June 10 or 12; schedule meetings and reminders
- Clinics: Flu, Diabetic, etc.
4.) Communication/Patient Flow
- Internal Relations – department interactions
- Ideas for Flow – Surveys
5.) Marketing Plans & Projects/General Media
The internship may not be limited to these projects, and some of these projects may not be done depending on time and other constraints. Further details of these projects can be discussed and explained before or when the internship begins. Also, personal meetings with Eric Pulice or other management staff will be done throughout the day to keep them updated on current project progress and to answer any of the questions that may arise.
Internship Hours and Stipend
The intern will work the required amount of hours requested by his or her program, or these hours can be discussed and arranged into a schedule that works best for the intern and management staff at MVA if there are no minimum hours required by the interns program. In addition, a $750 stipend will be provided as part of the internship. Once the intern has completed half of the required amount of hours previously discussed, the intern will receive half, or $375, of the stipend. The remaining half will be given at the completion of the internship. Also, this internship can be done on a project to project basis, which can be explained further when we meet with candidates in a preliminary interview. Please contact Eric Pulice through the contact information provided below.
Eric Pulice
Monongahela Valley Association of Health Centers, Inc.
PO BOX 1112 Fairmont, WV 26555-1112
(304) 367-8752
epuli@mvahealth.org