February 2009

In this Issue:

• New Resources 
  • NEW MEDIA
  • FELLOWSHIP OPPORTUNITIES 
  • FUNDING OPPORTUNITIES 
  • PUBLICATIONS
    
    
• Activities in the Field
  
  
• Policy Updates
  
  
• Upcoming Events

New Resources

NEW MEDIA:

• So You Think You Know Minority Health? is a new interactive game from Families USA's Minority Health Initiative. Based on the classic Jeopardy game, it is designed to test your knowledge of the health disparities facing people of color in America today. To play this game, click here.
  
• Families USA recently hosted its annual conference Health Action 2009. The minority health track featured sessions on health care reform, immigrant health, social determinants of health, ethnic media, and state health equity initiatives. To view conference highlights, including webcasts and presentations, click here.
  
• The Annie E. Casey Foundation hosts an online database called Kids Count, which contains state- and city-level data for over 100 measures of child well-being. This database can generate custom reports for specific geographic areas and compare them based on a topic (e.g., poverty, education, and health/health insurance). According to new data on Kids Count, more than one in two children living in Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York City, and Dallas live with at least one foreign born parent; and many of these children lack health insurance (21 percent of children in Texas aged 17 and under). To view and use this database, click here.

FELLOWSHIP OPPORTUNITIES:

Color the Future of Medicine Fellowship

Color the Future of Medicine Fellowship (CMF) is a newly created program to assist prospective medical and dental students with the financial expense associated with applying to medical and dental school. Research shows that one of the leading factors preventing minorities from applying to medical and dental professional programs is the costs associated with the preparation. CMF’s intent is to help alleviate some of the expense for prospective students through leveraging its partnerships with universities, companies, and other related organizations. The application deadline is April 1, 2009. For more information about the fellowship, click here.

FUNDING OPPORTUNITIES:

Communities Creating Healthy Environments

Communities Creating Healthy Environments (CCHE), a national program of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF), will provide training, technical assistance and three-year grants of up to $250,000 to ten local advocacy groups working in communities of color and indigenous nations to develop effective, replicable policy initiatives that achieve food and recreation equity in the communities where they work. Applicants must first submit a brief proposal to the RWJF grant-making online system by February 26, 2009. Brief proposals will be reviewed and scored according to the criteria listed in the Call for Proposals.

Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Investigator Awards

The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) Investigator Awards in Health Policy Research funds highly-qualified individuals to undertake broad studies of the most challenging health policy issues facing America. RWJF will award approximately 10 grants of up to $335,000 each to investigators from a variety of disciplines to support projects that combine creative and conceptual thinking with innovative, policy-relevant approaches. The RWJF welcomes applications from investigators in the health, social, and behavioral sciences, as well as other fields. They seek a diverse group of applicants, including minorities, early-career investigators, and individuals who work in nonacademic settings such as research firms and policy organizations. A letter of intent is due March 25, 2009. For more information click here.

PUBLICATIONS:

• The American Journal of Preventive Medicine published Neighborhood Environments: Disparities in Access to Healthy Foods in the U.S., which finds that residents of low-income, minority, and rural neighborhoods are most often affected by limited access to supermarkets and healthy food. In fact, the availability of fast-food restaurants and high-calorie foods has been found to be greater in lower-income and minority neighborhoods. To view this article, click here.
  
• The Prevention Institute and the Health Policy Institute at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies have published Reducing Inequities in Health and Safety through Prevention. This memo emphasizes the need for a national commitment to eliminating health inequities and provides concrete strategies for achieving equitable health outcomes for all. To view this memo, click here.
  
• The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and Hablamos Juntos released a new online toolkit, More Than Words, which is designed to assist individuals and organizations in initiating translations of health care text of all types, whether they work with translators or through translation vendors. It also helps organizations evaluate the quality of translations, which requires trained raters. To view and download this toolkit, click here.
  
• The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality recently published Measuring Trends in Recent Racial/Ethnic Disparities, which used data from the 1996-2005 Medical Expenditure Panel Survey (MEPS) to compare trends in racial/ethnic disparities, and to assess the influence of changes in socioeconomic status among racial/ethnic minorities on disparity trends. To view an abstract of this study, click here.
  
• A study was recently published by the Harvard Medical School/Cambridge Health Alliance, Measuring Trends in Racial/Ethnic Health Care Disparities. Researchers found that after adjustment for health status and other measures of need for services (between 1996-2005), African American and Latino populations were significantly less likely to have a doctor visit in the last year and fewer health care resources were spent on these minority populations in comparison to whites. To view this study, click here.

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Activities in the Field

King County Equity and Social Justice Initiative

In February 2008, King County (Washington State) launched the Equity & Social Justice Initiative to eliminate long-standing and persistent inequities and social injustices. The goal of the initiative is for all King County residents to live in communities of opportunity. To reach this goal, all communities must be equipped with the means to provide individuals with access to livable wage, affordable housing, quality education, quality heath care, and safe and vibrant neighborhoods.

The initiative has several target areas, including efforts to reduce racial/ethnic disparities in health care. For example, to increase availability of health information for people with limited English proficiency, they developed a translation policy and system, which includes guidelines for creating high quality translations. Included in the guidelines are language maps for King County, priority languages, quality translation vendors, and a translation worksheet to guide the translation process. The initiative has also crafted and implemented strategies to reduce inequities in early childhood services. Among its activities, they developed culturally and linguistically appropriate outreach materials for Somali, Spanish, and Vietnamese families in response to data on utilization of prevention services for children with developmental disabilities. King County Executive Ron Sims said "It is unacceptable that the color of your skin or your home address are good predictors of whether you will have a low birth weight baby, die from diabetes or your children will graduate from high school or end up in jail."

In addition to external outreach, the initiative trains and educates its employees on social justice and equity issues. For example, hundreds of King County employees at all levels have participated in dialogues about equity and social justice following a screening of the PBS documentary Unnatural Causes: Is Inequality Making Us Sick? to educate employees about root causes of inequities.

For more information about the initiative’s accomplishments in the past year, click here to view their 2009 annual report.

For more information about the initiative, contact Matías Valenzuela at matias.valenzuela@kingcounty.gov and visit their website at http://www.kingcounty.gov/exec/equity.aspx.

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Policy Updates

President Obama Signs Children’s Health Insurance Bill

On February 4, 2009, President Obama signed into law HR 2, which will reauthorize and expand the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) to cover an additional four million children by 2013. President Obama said this bill is the first step towards “achieving universal health coverage in the U.S.”

The bill includes several provisions, which seek to reduce racial and ethnic health disparities:

• Eliminates a five-year waiting period for legal immigrant children and pregnant women to become eligible for Medicaid and CHIP.
  
• Offers increased federal funding for translation or interpretation services.
  
• Includes $100 million in funding to be used specifically for grants to organizations that promote Medicaid and CHIP outreach and enrollment: $10 million will be used for a nationwide outreach campaign, $10 million for grants specifically to reach out to Native American children, and the remaining $80 million are for grants to state and local organizations (including government agencies). The Secretary of Health and Human Services will award these grants, with a preference given to organizations that serve areas with a high percentage of uninsured children and/or racial and ethnic minorities. 

The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act Includes Health Provisions

Last week, Congress approved the economic stimulus package (American Recovery and Reinvestment Act) for $787 billion, which President Obama signed into law this week. The recovery package includes a number of health provisions, which provide several steps forward toward achieving health equity:

• Provides $19 billion to modernize the health care system by catalyzing adoption of health information technology by 2014. This includes language to ensure that data is collected on race, ethnicity, and primary language.
  
• Provides $87 billion in Federal Medical Assistance Percentage (FMAP) aid to the states so that no state has to cut eligibility for public programs, like CHIP and Medicaid, due to tightened budgets.
  
• Provides a 65 percent tax credit to help unemployed eligible workers purchase health coverage through COBRA, thus helping to provide health coverage for seven million Americans.
  
• Provides $500 million to support programs like the National Health Services Corps, which places health providers in underserved communities.
  
• Invests $2 billion in community health centers to support renovation and repairs, health information technology, and critically needed health care services.
  
• Invests $500 million to modernize rural clinics, update health care technology, and allow for contract health services for Alaskan Natives and Native Americans.

To read all of the health provisions included in this act, click here.

Upcoming Events

• National Boricua Latino Health Organization 2009 Annual Conference
  February 20-21, 2009
  University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, Biomedical Research Building, BRB
  421 Curie Boulevard, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104
  Sponsors: National Boricua Latino Health Organization
  For more information and to register, click here.
  
• Beyond Health Care Coverage: Addressing Inequality and Health Disparities in America
  February 23, 2009, 9:15 a.m. - 12:30 p.m.
  The Commonwealth Club, 595 Market Street, San Francisco, California 94105
  Sponsors: The California Endowment, Stanford University Center for the Study of Poverty and Inequality, Spotlight on Poverty and Opportunity
  For more information and to register, click here.
  
• Cultivating Healthy Communities: 20th National Conference on Chronic Disease Prevention & Control
  February 23-25, 2009
  The Gaylord National, 201 Waterfront Street, National Harbor, Maryland 20745
  Sponsors: The Centers for Disease Control & Prevention (CDC)
  For more information and to register, click here.
  
• Third National Leadership Summit on Eliminating Racial and Ethnic Disparities in Health: A Blueprint for Change
  February 25-27, 2009
  The Gaylord National, 201 Waterfront Street, National Harbor, Maryland 20745
  Sponsors: U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Office of Minority Health
  For more information and to register, click here.  
  
• 2009 Minority Health Conference: Our World, Our Community: Building Bridges for Health Equality
  February 27, 2009, 8 a.m. - 5 p.m.
  William and Ida Friday Center, 100 Friday Center Drive, CB 1020, UNC-Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, North Carolina 27599
  Sponsors: University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Public Health Minority Student Caucus
  For more information and to register, click here.
  
• Exploring Health Inequalities through Unnatural Causes
  March 4, 2009, 4:00 p.m. - 5:30 p.m.
  Claudia Cohen Hall, Terrace Room, University of Pennsylvania, 249 South 36th Street, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104
  Sponsors: University of Pennsylvania
  For more information, click here.
  
• 2009 L.H.B. Foote Minority Health Symposium and Memorial Lecture, "Examining the Impact of Developmental Disabilities on Minority Health and Education"
  March 6, 2009, 8:00 a.m. - 4:00 p.m.
  Hyatt Regency Sarasota, 1000 Boulevard of the Arts, Sarasota, Florida, 34326
  Sponsors: Institute for African American Health
  For more information: Email info@blackhealthbeat.com

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