The University of New Mexico (UNM) will join Cleveland State University/Northeast Ohio Medical University, the University of Cincinnati, University of Missouri-Kansas City, and the State University of New York to form U-HEALTH to act as anchor schools to drive necessary changes for local urban health equity.UNM’s Health Sciences Center (HSC) will receive $412,000 over four years to work through the U-HEALTH consortium in Albuquerque to increase diversity institutionally and systemically to strengthen healthcare in underserved urban communities.
Short term, this grant will strengthen UNM’s healthcare professionals ability to help the underserved population of Albuquerque and the rest of state. Long term, knowledge gained from this project will be applied to other universities, healthcare clinics, and hospitals across the nation to enhance health equity in urban areas.
The goal for U-HEALT is to eventually build capacity and infrastructure to:
- Assess institutional and community needs
- Develop partnerships to educate and train as well as develop local and regional health equity data systems
- To identify metrics associated with institutional education and training and develop data systems to track the information
- Assess the adequacy of existing local and regional data needed to identify existing databases and gaps and look at possible solutions to strengthen the data systems
- Provide information on national policy and practice
The U-Health initiative is supported through the Association of Public and Land-Grant Universities, Coalition of Urban Serving Universities, Association of American Medical Colleges, and the National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities within NIH.
“Right now in Albuquerque, we will focus first on communities in the South Valley and the Southeast Heights that are experiencing significant health disparities. Knowledge gained from this project can be applied to other urban and rural populations and will improve our capabilities to reduce health workforce shortages statewide,” states Richard Larson, Executive Vice Chancellor and Vice Chancellor for Research at UNM Health Science Center.
For more information email Dr. Jennifer Danek at Jennifer@tigdc.com at (206) 390-1694.