MinorityNurse.com

Vital Signs

New Health Disparities Database Focuses on Solutions, Not Statistics

In a 2003 editorial titled “Too Much Talk and Not Enough Action,” Minority Nurse reported on the growing frustration among many minority health leaders who feel it’s time to move beyond collecting data about racial and ethnic health disparities and start focusing on finding solutions to these inequities. In the words of Vanessa Gamble, MD, PhD, a noted expert on race and diversity in the medical profession, “We need to stop studying the problem and start taking action.”

One organization that agrees strongly with this opinion is the American Public Health Association (APHA), which represents more than 50,000 public health professionals. This spring, APHA organized its annual National Public Health Week activities around the theme of “Eliminating Health Disparities: Communities Moving from Statistics to Solutions.” During the week of April 5-11, APHA sponsored a series of town hall meetings and other events in cities across the nation to showcase innovative best practices that are being used successfully to help eliminate minority health disparities.

To make sure this focus on “examples of real community solutions from around the country” continues long after National Public Health Week has faded from memory, APHA has created an online Community Solutions to Health Disparities Database containing profiles of projects and interventions that are making a real difference in closing the gap of unequal health outcomes. Health professionals can visit the database, located at www.apha.org/NPHW/solutions, to find ideas and model programs they can adapt to the needs of their own communities. They can also submit information about their own health disparities projects so that others can learn from their success.

Visitors can search the database by various categories, including geographic location, racial and ethnic groups, target age group and gender-specific projects. You can also search by program type or topic--e.g., increasing health literacy, creating public/private partnerships to improve health, increasing the number of minorities working in the health system--and by entering keywords, such as “cancer prevention” or “nursing students.”

APHA has been collecting these solutions since December 2003 and has received funding from the United Health Foundation to help continue and expand the database project. Examples of community interventions profiled in the database include Henry Ford Health System’s “African American Initiative for Male Health Improvement (AIMHI),” the Urban Indian Health Institute’s “Youth Tobacco Prevention Project” and
Inova Health System’s breast cancer and hepatitis prevention campaigns targeted to Korean Americans.

Do you have a solution to share? APHA is inviting Minority Nurse readers who have developed programs addressing racial and ethnic health disparities to enter their projects into the disparities solutions database. Simply go to www.apha.org/NPHW/solutions,
click on “Submit a Project/Intervention” and fill out an easy online submission form. According to APHA, projects do not necessarily have to be “proven” successes, just promising ones that have the potential to make a difference.