Friday, April 26, 2024
4/26/2024
Advancing Health Literacy to Enhance Equitable Response to COVID-19 in Jacksonville?s Health Zone 1Those living in Health Zone 1(HZ1), our target area, and Jacksonville?s urban core, experience more acute levels of social vulnerability than other areas of our city. Disproportionately, protective resources, including access to information about COVID-19, are scarce throughout HZ1. Lower access to information about disease rates, testing, treatment, and mitigating behavior, endangers our most vulnerable citizens. While residents identifying as African American represent 31% of Jacksonville?s population, those residents represent 39% of the hospitalizations in our city. In addition, of the 235,422 people who have received vaccinations in Jacksonville, less than 17% identified as African American. To address the issues leading to social vulnerability and to improve health literacy, the City of Jacksonville will increase access to culturally appropriate health information for residents of HZ1. This project will activate Community Health Workers (CHWs) to connect directly with vulnerable populations, while trustworthy, equity enhancing health information is delivered across multiple media platforms. Community outreach expects to reach 80% of the target population. Additionally, this project will train 1,500 providers in health literacy, linguistic competency, cultural humility, trauma-informed care, and basic principles of addressing high risk-low trust populations. Leading the overall project, the Health Planning Council of Northeast Florida (HPCNEF) will contract with local collaboratives and partner with our local health department and minority serving institution to implement our health literacy strategies. Provider training will be led by Population Health Consortium (PHC), a local collaboration of medical and health professional organizations adept in training local providers in health literacy. This program will engage the Duval Safet y Net Collaborative (DSN), a collective of local providers, focused on delivering health care for uninsured residents of Jacksonville. Working with UF Health, DSN will disseminate culturally appropriate messaging and education about COVID-19 mitigation measures and updated vaccine materials. To support the provider health and community health programs, the Mayor?s Health Literacy Campaign, with guidance from The Eighth and Whitner Group, will promote a multi-media approach that addresses vaccine hesitancy in the target population. The campaign will use vetted media products from the CDC, Ad Council, and Black Coalition Against COVID, as well as other, trusted media sources. An independent Quality Improvement and Evaluation Plan, led by Dr. Brian Seymour at the Edward Waters College (EWC), Center for the Prevention of Health Disparities, will direct the systematic collection and review of data from engaged community partners to assess the extent to which they are meeting project metrics and objectives. Data will be used to assess process and outcome metrics and to drive continued program improvements. Key outcome measures will include determining the reach of media strategies, counting the number of contacts by outreach workers and referrals to vaccine sites, and conducting community conversations to evaluate effectiveness and receive feedback. This project will also measure the number and types of providers trained, the results of the pre/post learning measures from trainings and CLAS self-assessments, and the number of providers registering to provide vaccines. To measure the impact of the provider training, patient surveys will be administered by the evaluation team to determine if providers demonstrated culturally appropriate care in accordance with Healthy People 2030 communication objectives. Vaccination uptake, demographics of recipients and practices, influences to receive vaccine, and history of vaccine hesitancy will be monitored in HZ1.
HHS’ Tracking Accountability in Government Grants System (TAGGS) website provides access to detailed descriptions of grants, loans, aggregated direct payments and other types of financial assistance awarded by the HHS Operating Divisions (OPDIVs) and the Office of the Secretary Staff Divisions (STAFFDIVs).
