Research Center on Health Disparities
The Public Health Sciences Institute of Morehouse College was established in 1988 by a cooperative agreement with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. PHSI is part of the Division of Science and Mathematics and functions as an academic program that formulates and implements strategies that will lead to positive health outcomes for African Americans. It is the only undergraduate program in public health in the Atlanta University Center, and coordinates public health training with Spelman College, Morris Brown College, and Clark Atlanta University. In the fall of 2001, the PHSI Advisory Committee approved the development of the Research Center on Health Disparities (RCHD).
The RCHD mission is to contribute to the elimination of health disparities by building a coordinated body of research and information that helps to explain the morbidity and mortality gaps experienced by racial and ethnic groups in the United States and by developing effective population-level intervention strategies. Within the AUC, RCHD’s unique roll will be to focus on the social determinants of health disparities, thus, complementing the biomedical research conducted at the Morehouse School of Medicine.
The RCHD is working with the Southeast Community Research Center to expand the approach to eliminating racial and ethnic health disparities by uniting researchers from Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) with the communities they serve to generate innovative, participatory research and prevention activities that respect the ethics of the community and that results in social action.
PROBLEM STATEMENT
There are many causes for the existence of health disparities—from the biological to the social. We believe that the health challenges that southerners face are, in large measure, tied to social factors, such as, socioeconomic status, discrimination, and injurious work and home environments—the so-called “social determinants of health.” We envision closing the health gap by improving aspects of the social environment that are the conduit to unfair social patterning of health. Our tools will be interdisciplinary approaches to problem solving and variations of community participatory methods. Our work will also contribute to a maturing public health research ethics on studying health disparities.
PROJECT OVERVIEW
We have combined four elements to create a coordinated assault on health disparities in the Southeast. The elements of this project are:
Element One: Develop racial/ethnic minority faculty to address health disparities research.
A shift from a multidisciplinary program to an interdisciplinary approach requires cross-disciplinary training in different conceptual domains. RCHD will work with HBCU faculty to move from completing a multidisciplinary set of pilot research studies to developing an interdisciplinary research team that will focus on developing innovative research methods for studying the complex social determinants that may underlie disparities in health outcome experienced by African Americans.
Element Two: Build capacity and readiness in communities of color for participatory interventions and research on health disparities.
Our focus on social determinants of health compels us to form equitable partnerships with our community associates, so that together we can uncover the etiologies of health disparities, design effective interventions to address them, and ensure community recognition and acceptance of recommendations formulated—and therefore, improve translation of research into action.
Element Three: Clarify minority perspectives on the ethics of health research and practices.
Within the African American community, there is dissent in two important science policy areas: first, the assumed objective nature of research and, second, the process used to protect human subjects enrolled in research. We will articulate these two concerns and deepen our endeavors to connect scientific practices with cultural and historical perspectives of minority communities, and to devise a practical approach to including these perspectives in policy.
Element Four: Increase African-American leadership in health policy and management.
Too few persons of color hold positions of authority in health policy-making positions. The missing voice from communities of color, we believe, contributes to current disparities in health and impedes the success of intervention strategies to ameliorate these differences. We will increase the number of African-Americans and other minorities who enroll in public health policy, management, and administration programs at the master’s and Ph.D. levels.
