Santé publique France is France’s national public health agency. A public institution under the authority of the Minister of Health, formed through the merger of several public institutions and established by Order No. 2016-246 of April 15, 2016, the agency works to promote public health. As a scientific, expert, and public health safety agency, its missions are:

1. Epidemiological observation and surveillance of the population’s health status;
2. Monitoring health risks threatening the population;
3. Promoting health and reducing health risks;
4. Developing prevention and health education;
5. Preparation for and response to health threats, alerts, and crises;
6. Issuing public health alerts.

The agency is organized into 12 departments—some scientific, some cross-functional, and some providing operational support.

The agency’s strategic priorities and work program, established by its Board of Directors, are organized into three areas: Strengthening the capacity to anticipate and respond proactively to health threats; Measuring and assessing the extent of diseases and risk factors to guide their prevention and control; Strengthening the health impact of all public policies, as well as health prevention and promotion.

Division of Noncommunicable Diseases and Injuries - Cancer Unit

Internship Responsibilities

During the internship, the intern will be required to:

• describe the sociodemographic characteristics of individuals with a PSU for sunburn in each of the databases;
• determine models through time-series analysis (all of France, metropolitan France, regions);
• determine thresholds (epidemic or even notification thresholds) using appropriate methods (e.g., Serfling modeling or hidden Markov models);
• using available meteorological data, study the correlation between time series for cities using a comprehensive dataset (PSU and meteorological data);
• discuss the results in light of current knowledge on UV radiation and propose ways to improve prevention measures;
• participate in drafting documents to present the results: report, scientific article

Objective of the Internship

• The objective of this internship is to identify the characteristics of individuals seeking care at emergency departments for sunburn and to study the seasonality of emergency department visits for sunburn by analyzing the possibility of establishing information thresholds.

Internship Activities

• Using the R software, the intern will perform descriptive statistics and time-series analyses, and will provide graphical representations to illustrate the results.