Benchmarks for Schools of Public Health to Achieve to Eliminate Racial and Ethnic Health Disparities

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Benchmarks for Schools of Public Health to
Achieve to Eliminate Racial and Ethnic Health
Disparities

• Presented by Dean James Kyle, MD, MDiv (LLU)
• Chair, ASPH/Kellogg Taskforce
• ASPH Associate Deans Retreat
• June 2006

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Why is this important?

• Cancer Screening and ManagementAfrican American
  women are more than twice as likely to die of
  cervical cancer than are white women and are more
  likely to die of breast cancer than are women of
  any other racial or ethnic group.
• DiabetesIn 2000, American Indians and Alaska
  Natives were 2.6 times more likely to have
  diagnosed diabetes compared with non-Hispanic
  Whites, African Americans were 2.0 times more
  likely, and Hispanics were 1.9 times more likely.
• Infant MortalityAfrican American, American
  Indian, and Puerto Rican infants have higher
  death rates than white infants. In 2000, the
  black-to-white ratio in infant mortality was 2.5
  (up from 2.4 in 1998). This widening disparity
  between black and white infants is a trend that
  has persisted over the last two decades.
• Source CDC Office of Minority Health,
  http//www.cdc.gov/omh/AMH/AMH.htm

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Background

• February 2005 W. K. Kellogg Foundation seminar,
  Racial and Ethnic Health Disparities Schools of
  Public Health Respond as Engaged Institutions
• Kellogg funded ASPH to work on this effort
• The taskforce was convened in Summer 2005

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Taskforce Charge

• The ASPH/Kellogg Taskforce is charged with
  identifying best practices for accredited schools
  and programs of public health to achieve in order
  to eliminate racial and ethnic health disparities
  in the nations communities. Part of this
  includes addressing disparities in the proportion
  of minority faculty in the schools and programs
  of public health across the nation.
• The Taskforce will work closely with the ASPH
  Diversity Committee, an active standing committee
  that advises the Deans and Executive Committee on
  strategies to address issues relating to minority
  faculty, minority students, the minority health
  professions workforce, and minority public
  health, at-large.

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Taskforce Members
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Taskforce Activities

• Baseline Assessment
• Collected data on SPH activities related to the
  elimination of racial and ethnic health
  disparities
• Data was collected in December and January, and
  then summarized
• Minority Faculty Retreat, January 31-February 1
• Reps from 36 schools and 9 programs attended
• Draft benchmarks

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Charge for Today

• Are the benchmarks realistic? feasible?
• Do you have any alternate or additional ideas?
  Are there any missing benchmarks you would
  suggest?
• Do you have any suggestions for measures for
  these benchmarks, and for the timeframe for
  achieving them?
• If you have any specific wordsmithing edits,
  please send them to Gillian Silver at ASPH,
  gsilver_at_asph.org.

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Draft BenchmarksFor Public Health Schools and
Programs

• Research
• Curriculum
• Students
• Community Outreach and True Partnerships
• Policy and Advocacy
• Faculty
• Tenure and Promotion

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SPH Research

• Encourage collaboration that equitably involves
  multiple principal investigators in the
  development, implementation, and evaluation of
  community-based participatory research/health
  disparities research.
• Facilitate research collaboration between faculty
  at minority-serving institutions (MSIs) and
  majority institutions (MIs).
• Increase the number of peer-reviewed publications
  co-authored by MSI and MI faculty.

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SPH Curriculum

• Offer an elective course that focuses on health
  disparities.
• Create or maintain a minimum of one module,
  section, or case study that teaches students
  about health disparities in one or more required
  courses.
• Develop practica placements/activities for
  students that include opportunities to learn
  about and work to address health disparities
  issues.
• Create or maintain in-house seminars (one series
  per year) to bring visibility to health
  disparities issues.

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SPH Students

• Create, maintain, or enhance pipeline programs
  that foster the interest of young students in
  public health careers.
• Increase the number of underrepresented minority
  students enrolled in the SPH, with the goal to
  reflect the demography of the national
  population.
• Conduct a self-study to review and elicit ways to
  improve minority student retention. Develop a
  program based on data from the self-study to
  increase student retention.
• Faculty mentors are encouraged to discuss racial
  and ethnic health disparities issues with all
  student mentees, and to involve students in
  research focused on racial and ethnic health
  disparities.

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SPH Community Outreach True Partnerships

• Formally commit to cultivating a partnership with
  a community and work with that community to
  address its health disparities.
• Create multi-disciplinary efforts to address
  community health issues by incorporating other
  academic disciplines in the effort (e.g., urban
  studies, political science, education, social
  work, etc.).
• Encourage universities to take a leadership role
  in mobilizing their institutions and external
  organizations (agencies in the community,
  different from CBOs) to work on addressing racial
  and ethnic health disparities.

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SPH Policy Advocacy

• Play an active role in local or state
  commissions, task forces or Office of Minority
  Health on health disparities.
• Partner with the state department of health and
  other stakeholders to convene a planning meeting
  on minority health and health disparities.
• Sponsor faculty development workshops on
  translation of research for purposes of policy
  development and analysis.
• Take a leadership role on the university campus
  to initiate or further campus-wide support for
  community engagement and community-engaged
  scholarship.

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SPH Faculty

• Increase the number of underrepresented minority
  faculty in public health schools and programs,
  with the goal to reflect the demography of the
  national population.
• Appoint practitioners who work with
  underrepresented minority communities to the
  faculty.
• Form support groups for minority faculty in
  similar disciplines within the university
  community, especially for open discussion of
  issues too sensitive for individual mentors.
• Provide junior faculty with the opportunity to
  have reviewers read their papers and grant
  applications, to assist in their career
  development.
• Designate resources within school and program
  budgets to pay for underrepresented minority
  faculty to attend national meetings.
• Develop training/workshops for faculty that focus
  on imparting teaching skills and on managing
  funded research, and encourage new faculty to
  participate in these trainings.
• Encourage junior faculty to take advantage of
  institutional research support mechanisms
  currently provided.

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SPH Faculty -- Tenure and Promotion

• Charge department chairs to review with new
  faculty the criteria for tenure and promotion, as
  well as encourage periodic reviews to assess
  progress and the need for additional help.
• Assign a senior faculty mentor to new faculty
  members to assist them in developing a strategic
  plan for tenure and promotion, and meet
  periodically with them to monitor progress.
• Provide protected time for new faculty, in order
  to help them move successfully towards tenure and
  promotion.
• Educate the members of promotion and tenure
  committees about community engagement and
  community-engaged scholarship, and prepare them
  to understand and apply the guidelines in the
  review of community-engaged faculty.

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SPH Tenure and Promotion (contd)

• 12. Proposed changes to tenure and promotion
  committee policies
• Increase the number of years allowed for junior
  faculty to come up for promotion or tenure to
  allow for development of partnerships with
  community, implementation of the interventions,
  translation of those interventions, and
  evaluation of research process and outcomes.
• Change the schools culture so that an NIH R01 is
  not valued over other grant awards of similar
  magnitude.
• Recognize/value faculty policy development and
  analysis efforts.
• Involve community partners in a meaningfully way
  in the promotion and tenure processes for
  community-engaged faculty members.

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Draft Benchmarks for ASPH

• Faculty
• Research
• Curriculum
• Policy and Advocacy

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ASPH Faculty

• Provide opportunities for minority faculty to
  network at national meetings.
• Collaborate with the NIH Office of Minority
  Health and other funding agencies to create
  post-doctoral training opportunities for
  underrepresented minorities.
• Develop publication/book on career advancement
  issues specific to minority faculty.
• Post health disparities curricula on a web-based
  archive.
• Develop a data bank or list of experts on
  minority health researchers for the purposes of
  research collaboration and mentoring.

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ASPH Faculty (contd)

• Advocate for agencies to fund minority faculty
  career development efforts.
• Offer faculty workshops on excellence in teaching
  pre-APHA annual meeting (on topics including use
  of alternative methods to support teaching (e.g.,
  webcasts, webinars), problem-based learning
  techniques, and practice-based teaching,
  research, and scholarship in practice).
• Convene a subcommittee to explore teaching
  requirements for junior faculty, protecting
  faculty time (encourage co-teaching with senior
  faculty).
• Commission a journal issue for the publication of
  taskforce/minority faculty-authored manuscripts.
• Convene a committee of representatives from
  schools and programs to develop sample language
  for insertion into individual schools tenure and
  promotion guidelines.

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ASPH Research

• Seek funding from foundations to develop and
  implement a process for the provision of start-up
  funds for junior faculty in community-based
  participatory research/health disparities
  research.
• Seek funding to enhance collaborative research
  between Minority-Serving Institutions and
  majority institutions.
• Include discussion of health disparities and
  community-based participatory research in Deans
  and Associate Deans retreats.
• Develop operational definition of health
  disparities research, and produce a health
  disparities document that includes a formal
  definition and defines the issues and
  significance to public health.

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ASPH Curriculum

• Solicit grant funds to award an annual prize for
  a health disparities class or module/materials
  development. Modules could include
  non-traditional ways of sharing information,
  e.g., oral history sharing for American Indians.
• Add health disparities as a classification/topic
  on the ASPH Public Health Case Studies Resource
  Center, and encourage faculty to submit case
  studies that highlight racial and ethnic health
  disparities issues.
• Offer workshops for faculty on developing
  curricula specific to community-based health
  disparities.

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ASPH Policy Advocacy

• Prioritize health disparities research in
  advocacy efforts.
• Strengthen relationships with the Congressional
  Black Caucus, the Latino Caucus, the
  Asian/Pacific Islander Caucus, and the Native
  American Caucus.
• Form a Friends of the National Center for
  Minority Health and Health Disparities
  coalition, in order to support full funding and
  sustaining the center.
• Co-sponsor the Health Education Advocacy Summit,
  sponsored annually by multiple health education
  and public health organizations
  (http//www.healtheducationadvocate.org/Summit/abo
  ut.html).
• Begin advocacy training, focused on health
  disparities issues, for interested
  administrators, faculty, staff, students and
  community partners.
• Develop a web-based advocacy resource center
  focused on health disparities.

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Prioritization

• Affix dot stickers next to
• the benchmarks that you think
• are the most important to work on
• as a top priority.

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THANK YOU!

• Thank you for your hard work and input.

If you have any comments, please contact Gillian
Silver at ASPH, gsilver_at_asph.org.