Disparities: Research for Change
Mona McCormick, Program Administrator,
Amy Walters, Research Assistant, Marshall
Chin, Director, Joe G.N. Garcia, Chairman
of Medicine, Monica Vela, Health Care
Disparities Curriculum Director, Scott Cook,
Deputy Director, Hui Tang, Programmer.
By Marshall Chin, MD and Scott Cook, PhD
- You are taking care of a 64 year old Spanish-speaking man in the emergency room complaining of abdominal pain. Because a translator is not readily available at 3:00 a.m., his 30 year old daughter interprets for you. The patient minimizes the significant amount of alcohol he has started consuming lately because he is embarrassed and does not want to worry his daughter further.
- You have just done a great job caring for a 55 year-old African-American man who had been admitted to your general medicine team with worsening of his heart failure. He is ready to go home, but he tells you that he cannot afford the medications you have prescribed nor the outpatient follow-up appointment you have arranged because he has no health insurance.
Unfortunately, health disparities, differences in the care or outcomes of patients that have nothing to do with the patients’ underlying medical conditions, are all too common nationally. Disparities can result from many factors including differential access to health care or high quality care, overt or subtle racism, and a lack of cultural competency and effective communication by health care providers. National health care disparities have been extensively documented. Mechanisms for the disparities are also well known. The crying need is for solutions.
What can medical students, do to reduce disparities? The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation recently awarded an $8 million grant to the University of Chicago and National Opinion Research Center to become the National Program Office for a new major initiative called Finding Answers: Disparities Research for Change. Led by Marshall Chin, MD, MPH, Associate Professor of Medicine, over 25 faculty and staff across the University are at the vanguard for this national effort housed on campus in the Center for Health and the Social Sciences (CHeSS) chess.bsd.uchicago.edu. Many opportunities exist for students to get involved in this effort to attack disparities.
The goals of Finding Answers are to discover and evaluate interventions to reduce racial and ethnic health care disparities, disseminate the findings nationally and translate them into real-world practice. The program will examine innovative efforts to reduce racial and ethnic gaps in the treatment of cardiovascular disease, depression and diabetes.
Finding Answers will also conduct systematic reviews of existing literature about interventions to narrow racial and ethnic health care disparities. University of Chicago students, residents, and fellows are already participating in these reviews which will be published as a supplement to a medical journal, and disseminated through a Web-based, searchable electronic database.
Joe G.N. “Skip” Garcia, MD, Lowell T. Coggeshall Professor and Chairman of the Department of Medicine, has been a tremendous supporter of efforts to reduce racial and ethnic disparities in health care and has provided $700,000 to the Finding Answers project to enhance health care disparities research at the University of Chicago. Funds will bring expert visiting scholars to the University to speak at health disparities research seminars, provide travel stipends for trainees and junior faculty to attend national meetings on health disparities, support pilot grants designed to create and evaluate innovative health disparities research projects, create a medical school curriculum led by Monica Vela, MD, on health disparities, and support innovative research partnerships between the University of Chicago and the community to reduce health care disparities. Additionally, James Madara, MD, Dean of the Biological Sciences Division and the Pritzker School of Medicine, has allocated significant financial support and space for Finding Answers and the Center for Health and the Social Sciences.
You can learn more about Finding Answers at www.solvingdisparities.org
To learn how you can be involved in the Finding Answers project or other health disparities initiatives, please contact:
Deputy Director Scott Cook, PhD (scook1@bsd.uchicago.edu) or Marshall Chin, MD (mchin@medicine.bsd.uchicago.edu).
