Second National
Conference on
Quality Health Care for Culturally Diverse Populations:
Strategy and Action for Communities, Providers, and a Changing Health
System
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Second National
Conference on |
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| October 11-14, 2000 |
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Wed., October 11 | Th., October 12 | Fr., October 13 | Sat., October 14 | Poster Presentations | ||||||||
II-A1: Teaching Physicians For, About And By The CommunityMany health care providers care for patients from communities that are very different from their own, yet they rarely have any formal or practical introduction to the lives, families, backgrounds, and cultural and social contexts of their patients. This workshop introduces a collaborative effort on the part of physicians, a community organization, and, most importantly, community members to provide generalist physicians with a better understanding of their patients, their needs, their cultures and the communities they come from. This curriculum is unique in that community residents who have been trained as teachers are the primary instructors in the course. It has been very successful in achieving the intended goals of helping physicians-in-training to better understand, relate to, and care for their patients seen at a large public hospital. This curriculum has also had the added benefit of increasing trust and understanding between community residents and physicians and of empowering the community residents who serve as teachers to take care of their own health care needs and advise their friends and neighbors on health related topics. However, it also had its challenges, including the limited time we have to teach this curriculum (12 hours over a month) and engaging the unengaged students. The greatest challenge we faced was focusing the resident physicians' attention on the course. They have many competing demands on their time and are often distracted by the their new responsibilities as a physician and, in the case of our residents the majority of whom are foreign medical graduates, the need to adjust to a new culture. We overcame this challenge by removing the residents from the hospital and teaching them in the community. We also focused on practical lessons that they could use in their everyday practice. Despite these challenges, developing the course and teaching in it has been a great learning experience for all involved. In addition to the lessons learned by the residents and community teachers, the faculty learned that this is an ideal way to teach about cross-cultural understanding and the role community plays in health. We hope that by the end of this workshop participants will be aware of the value of this kind of teaching and have an idea of how to develop a similar curriculum or program at their own institution. Dr. Jacobs, MD, AMPP is currently a clinician-researcher and Assistant Professor of Medicine at Cook County Hospital and Rush Medical College. She attended medical school at University of California at San Francisco, trained as a general internist at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, and completed a Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholars Fellowship at the University of Chicago prior to joining the faculty of the Collaborative Research Unit of Cook County Hospital. She has had a policy and research interest in minority disparities in health care beginning in her yeas as medical student when she encountered difficulty in providing care for her limited English-speaking patients. This inspired her to pursue a fellowship project examining the impact of adequate interpreter services on delivery of health care to LEP persons. She continues to pursue similar research, studying access to, and cultural specificity of, medical care delivered to minority patients. In addition, she cares for patients at a neighborhood health center and teaches residents and faculty about practicing culturally sensitive medicine and the use of race and ethnicity variables in research.
Claire Korhman, PhD is a sociologist and Director of Research and Development for the Westside Health Authority, a community based health care advocacy organization located on the Westside of Chicago. Throughout her career Dr. Kohrman has worked with and studied urban communities, health care, and health care professionals. She has completed multiple studies of health care on the Westside including a study of social and cultural barriers to health care as part of the Robert Wood Johnson and Kaiser Family Foundations initiative, œOpening Doors: Reducing Sociocultural Barriers to Health Care.” She continues to conduct similar research in Chicago's communities and teaches residents at Cook County Hospital, characteristically training community residents as researchers and teachers.
Dr. Vickers, MD, MPH is a pediatrician who heads the Cook County Bureau of Health Services Ambulatory Pediatrics Division. He attended Chicago Medical School and completed his pediatrics residency at Cook County Hospital. He has had a long-standing interest in community and community health and became interested in cultural issues in health care while serving as medical director of Children's Memorial Hospital's primary care clinic in Chicago's diverse uptown neighborhood. As a result of his work in this area, he has been invited to serve on the Illinois Department of Public Health's Task Force on Cultural Competency, give several talks and grand rounds on the topic, and currently heads Cook County Bureau of Health Services Cultural Competency Committee.
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essentials | models
and practices | policy |
legal issues | networking |
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Diversity Rx is sponsored by: |
 The National Conference of State Legislatures |
 Resources for Cross Cultural Health Care |
 Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation |
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