PUBH 6213 Week 11 Submission Package Example

Assembled, Checked and Scored Before the Portal Opens: A Submission Package and Internal Mock Review of a Composite Two-Year Request for School-Based Tele-Audiology Follow-Up in a Rural County

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Walden University

PUBH 6213: Public Health Grant Writing

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Month Day, Year

Assembled, Checked and Scored Before the Portal Opens: A Submission Package and Internal Mock Review of a Composite Two-Year Request for School-Based Tele-Audiology Follow-Up in a Rural County

What This Package Contains

This document has two parts. The first sets out the Tamarack County Health Department's complete application to the invented state grant program in the order its portal requires, with every format rule confirmed. The second is an internal document no reviewer will see: a mock review in which two staff who did not write the proposal scored the assembled narrative against the six review criteria, as a panel member would, ten days before the deadline.

Part 1: The Package in Required Order

Table 1

Application Components in Portal Order, With Format Checks

Note. Component order and rules follow the composite announcement.

Narrative Sections and What Each Carries

The narrative follows the review criteria in sequence. The problem statement opens on the county's own referral counts and keeps national data to supporting sentences. It explains that school hearing screens find many children with unrecognized loss, since a national survey found measurable loss in about one child in seven aged 6 to 19 (Niskar et al., 1998), and that mild loss can affect learning, as children with minimal loss in one district study had repeated a grade at high rates (Bess et al., 1998). The approach section describes the school-based model step by step, names each partner's role in the same words as the letters and grounds the design in a cluster-randomized trial from rural Alaska (Emmett et al., 2022). The work plan, evaluation plan, capacity statement and budget justification follow in that order, each referring to the work plan's objectives by number. Headings in the narrative repeat the criterion names exactly, so a reviewer moving down the scoring sheet can find each section without searching. Cross-references are kept short, such as "see Objective 2," because reviewers often read sections in a different order than the applicant wrote them, and a section that depends on an earlier one for its meaning can lose points when read alone.

Confirming the Rules

Three rules were checked twice because they cause most rejections at intake. First, the page limit: the narrative runs 11.5 pages after the problem statement was cut by a third of a page. Second, attachments: all ten components are present and named according to the portal's file naming rule. Third, the budget: the budget form, the narrative and the match described in partner letters were compared line by line, and one difference, a district's room value listed as $700 in its letter and $750 in the budget, was corrected in the budget to match the signed letter. The total match still meets the 10% requirement after adjusting another in-kind line.

Part 2: Internal Mock Review

Two department staff, an epidemiologist and the finance manager, neither of whom wrote the proposal, scored the narrative using the announcement's criteria and point values. Each scored independently, then the two met to agree on a final score and list the weaknesses they found.

Table 2

Mock Review Scores and Main Comments

Note. Scores from an internal review; they do not predict the panel's scores.

Three Fixes Made Before Submission

Fix 1: The Medical Pathway

The reviewers noticed that the approach explained what happens to children with hearing loss but not to children whose video otoscopy shows ear disease needing a physician. The approach section now states that the audiologist will flag these children, the coordinator will contact the child's primary care provider within two business days, and the referral log will track whether the child was seen. This mattered because in school screening programs, ear disease is often a large share of referrals; the Alaska trial counted screening positives for both hearing loss and ear disease, and more than half of enrolled children screened positive at least once across study years (Emmett et al., 2022).

Fix 2: Naming the Baseline's Weakness

The evaluation section described how the baseline would be rebuilt from last year's records but did not say that unrecorded visits could make it too low. The reviewers pointed out that a panel member would notice this and might assume the department had not. One sentence was added: "Because some completed evaluations were never recorded in nurse logs, the baseline may understate last year's follow-up, and the first annual report will show both the logged rate and an adjusted estimate." Stating the weakness first turns it into evidence of careful planning.

Fix 3: The Evaluator

Capacity mentioned a university evaluator without naming one. The program manager obtained a letter from a faculty member in the state university's public health department agreeing to serve, and the capacity section now names that person's role and experience with school health data.

How the Scores Were Reached

The two reviewers scored on their own first, using a copy of the announcement's scoring sheet, and their totals were 84 and 88. They differed most on evaluation, where the epidemiologist gave 10 and the finance manager 13. In conversation, the finance manager said she had read the baseline section as complete because it named a method, while the epidemiologist had looked for an admission of what the method could not show. They settled on 11 and agreed the gap was real. Differences of this kind are useful, because a real panel will contain readers of both types. The team treats any criterion where two internal reviewers differ by three or more points as a section that needs plainer writing, whatever the agreed score.

What the Mock Review Did Not Change

The reviewers suggested adding grade retention as an outcome. The team declined, explaining in an internal note that the program's activities could not plausibly change retention within two years and that promising it would invite a poor evaluation score. The logic model keeps learning outcomes as long-term aims only.

Submission

The package will be uploaded four business days before the deadline, leaving time to fix portal errors. The grants coordinator will download the submitted files from the portal, open each one and confirm it matches the final version. The confirmation email will be saved with the application file. School screening programs often fail at the step after a referral (Yong et al., 2020), and this application's whole argument is that one person should own every step; the submission itself is handled the same way.

References

Bess, F. H., Dodd-Murphy, J., & Parker, R. A. (1998). Children with minimal sensorineural hearing loss: Prevalence, educational performance, and functional status. Ear and Hearing, 19(5), 339-354. https://doi.org/10.1097/00003446-199810000-00001

Emmett, S. D., Platt, A., Turner, E. L., Gallo, J. J., Labrique, A. B., Inglis, S. M., Jenson, C. D., Parnell, H. E., Wang, N.-Y., Hicks, K. L., Egger, J. R., Halpin, P. F., Yong, M., Ballreich, J., & Robler, S. K. (2022). Mobile health school screening and telemedicine referral to improve access to specialty care in rural Alaska: A cluster-randomised controlled trial. The Lancet Global Health, 10(7), e1023-e1033. https://doi.org/10.1016/S2214-109X(22)00184-X

Niskar, A. S., Kieszak, S. M., Holmes, A., Esteban, E., Rubin, C., & Brody, D. J. (1998). Prevalence of hearing loss among children 6 to 19 years of age: The Third National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey. JAMA, 279(14), 1071-1075. https://doi.org/10.1001/jama.279.14.1071

Yong, M., Panth, N., McMahon, C. M., Thorne, P. R., & Emmett, S. D. (2020). How the world's children hear: A narrative review of school hearing screening programs globally. OTO Open, 4(2). https://doi.org/10.1177/2473974X20923580