Minority Health and Health Disparity Education Core

A review of existing courses and cultural competency training activities has been conducted with most of the schools of the Health Sciences at the University of Pittsburgh. Additional material on cultural competence training has been gathered from other schools of public health around the country. A significant amount of cultural competence training materials is available from Angela Ford at the Center for Minority Health and this material will be inventoried and catalogued as part of the Core activities.

Dr. South-Paul, Core Director reported she has been directly involved in a great deal of cultural competence training for students and fellows within the medical school. It would appear that she has become recognized as the resident expert and is being called upon to deliver this training in numerous venues within the Medical School and beyond. Work also continues on the cultural sensitivity assessment tool that is being developed for use by family medicine and other departments. This tool will be tested in collaboration with the American Academy of Medical Colleges (AAMC).

In GSPH considerable progress has been made in the development of a Health Disparities Certificate track which will be available to students in GSPH as well as those in other components of the University. In spite of these efforts there seems to be the continuing need for more health disparities/cultural competence training to be better institutionalized in the others schools of the health sciences and perhaps in the lower campus as well.

A meeting of the Core Advisory Group was held in March. The meeting was held for the purpose of reviewing the initial goals and objectives for the HDCCE Core, summarizing activity to date, determining the priorities for future activity, and to adjust the overall goals and objectives accordingly.

There was general agreement at the conclusion of this meeting that we should focus on building upon Dr. South-Paul's materials, those that Angela Ford and others have compiled for the CMH, and resources from the Chancellor's Diversity program to come up with a set of curriculum materials that could be applicable for HDCC training across the schools of the Health Sciences. K. Jaros will meet with Roderick Harris (graduate student assigned to the Core) to plan the next steps for compiling the existing resource material and beginning the development of modules that could be appropriate for implementation in various educational and training venues. Work on obtaining additional resource material from outside the university will continue, with the goal of eventually cataloging an annotated resource library, but this will be a secondary priority to the development of practical educational resources based on existing materials. Coordination of activity with the Research Training Core will be essential in the future to coordinate efforts and to avoid potential overlap of activities.