Community Health Worker Training Program - Project Director: Panagis Galiatsatos, MD, MHS Address: Contact Phone Numbers (Voice, Fax): (410) 367-2014; Fax 410-550-2612 Email: pgaliat1@jhmi.edu Grant program funds requested in the application: $2,400,518 Funding Preference: Requesting funding preference. This grant will train individuals who are from disadvantaged backgrounds (including underrepresented racial and ethnic minorities), and graduate large proportions of individuals who will serve in undeserved communities Abstract Throughout the state of Maryland, especially in Baltimore City, health-related disparities are often the most evident when reviewing them in the context of geographic location and life-expectancy. In Baltimore City in particular, to highlight such a disparity, simply living in some of the poorest regions (as identified by their census tract) results in a life expectancy up to 20-years less then more affluent neighborhoods. And in those same neighborhoods, there is a high prevalence of morbidities that are linked with dire health outcomes, from diabetes to cardiovascular disease, in addition to opioid use and homicides. And with the Baltimore City Neighborhood Health Profile reporting on these outcomes over 10 years (from 2008 to 2017), the disparities in life-expectancy have not been reduced. Overall, Baltimore City has the highest vulnerability ratings of any region in the state of Maryland. A better understanding of neighborhood disadvantage may result in an improved insight into the social context and sociobiological mechanisms that impact health disparities, which in turn may facilitate more improved and equitable interventions for the community in the immediate sense as well as fostering public policy for long-term changes. Our overarching goal is to advance health equity and reduce health disparities through well-trained community members, such as community health workers, peer-recovery staff, and other health support workers including sterile processing technicians, that work with vulnerable populations. To address key healthcare gaps, we propose the following project, HEAL (Health Educators, Advocates, and Leaders) Training, that considers community-level personnel and training them to be liaisons between the community and the healthcare system, as well as assuring such trained personnel find a permanent position in the healthcare system. With the HEAL (Health Educators, Advocates, and Leaders) Curriculum, our goal is not simply the promotion of health, wellbeing, and disease prevention and management, but implementation that is equitable, assuring participants who most need such extensive allocation of resources are met with HEAL-trained representatives of their respective community. And such communities, as mentioned, would be identified using the ADI. Each respective trained HEAL participant will balance insight into common health and medical concerns (e.g. substance use disorders) and match that insight with local-, regional-, and state-level resources that they can deploy in an efficient manner to patient recipients of the HEAL program in respective neighborhoods. Thereby, through the HEAL curriculum, we will have created a novel curriculum, built on the foundational andragogy of other current training-modalities created by our investigators, have the trainees be implemented in vulnerable communities of Baltimore City, and assure proper resources are allocated to these communities through the HEAL trainees. Ultimately, creating a culture of health, through social networks, transitivity, and homophily, will assure the foundational response needed to overcome health disparities is put in place permanently.
