$7M Grant Establishes New UIC Center to Eliminate Health Disparities
[Writer] This is research news from U-I-C – the University of Illinois at Chicago.
Today, Elizabeth Calhoun, associate professor of health policy and administration at the UIC School of Public Health and researcher at the Institute for Health Research and Policy, talks about a $7 million grant to create the UIC Center of Excellence in Eliminating Disparities.
Here’s professor Calhoun:
[Calhoun] The University of Illinois at Chicago is pleased to have received a Center of Excellence grant from the National Center on Minority Health and Health Disparities. The Centers of Excellence were established to make significant contributions in easing the health burdens in underserved populations, and reducing and ultimately eliminating health disparities across this country.
The Center of Excellence is going to be a university-wide and, hopefully, city and regional-wide resource to engage investigators in minority health and health disparities through a comprehensive research, training and education program. We plan to reach not only into our undergraduate and graduate populations, but even into high school to build a pipeline of researchers that are interested in minority health and health disparities research.
We are going to continue our significant prior work in communities by building programs and partnerships with these communities to help take on diseases and disease issues in their neighborhoods.
In particular, our center has 5 years of data through an NCI-funded Center for Population and Health Disparities in Breast Cancer, that we’re going to use to implement a community dissemination project lead by Carol Ferrans, the co-director of the center, to look and see if we can make significant differences in breast cancer screening rates and breast cancer compliance and follow-up to improve breast cancer care for African American women on the south side of Chicago.
Twenty years ago, African American women and white women had about the same mortality rate. Twenty years later, African American women are dying at about twice the rate of white women. It’s a significant health burden in Chicago.
Building on that model, we’re going to look at another significant cancer that has health disparities – colorectal cancer. Dr. Garth Rausher, who’ll be leading this project, will conduct a population-based epidemiology study to look at the adequacy of colorectal care in African Americans here in Chicago. He’s going to look at factors that would predict screening, and factors that are predictive of delays in diagnoses and treatment. There are significant barriers, and it’s important to identify these factors where intervention might improve the adequacy of care and ultimately reduce the stage at diagnosis.
Another project, lead by Dr. Vincent Freeman, is going to look at the factors contributing to racial disparities in prostate and colorectal cancer, and he plans to develop methods to forecast which communities are at greatest risk. This project will develop a large database on cancer cases diagnosed in Chicago from 1995 to 2008, to conduct population-based analyses in order to look at clinical, social and health care-related mechanisms that may account for the mortality differences between African Americans and Caucasians.
This project, in addition, will use statistical techniques to develop models where we could predict future hot spots – meaning areas of concentration heavily burdened with disease, so either lots of disease or more severe disease.
Identifying these at-risk areas helps to more effectively deploy resources to those areas, so obviously these would be areas we would want to target screening and educational efforts.
All of these tools together can help the arsenal to reduce health disparities in this country.
The Center of Excellence in Eliminating Health Disparities at the University of Illinois will be a university-wide resource to help integrate minority health and health disparities research across the university; to educate and build a pipeline of health disparities researchers through a mentoring and, a newly-developed certificate program in minority health and health disparities research.
The Center’s mission is to contribute significantly to reducing health disparities here in Chicago, but also across the country through our comprehensive research, community outreach, (and) mentoring and education program.
[Writer] Elizabeth Calhoun is an associate professor in health policy and administration, director and principal investigator of the UIC Center of Excellence in Eliminating Disparities.
For more information about this research, go to www.today.uic.edu, click on “news releases” and look for the release dated August 4, 2009.
This has been research news from U-I-C – the University of Illinois at Chicago.
