LOCUS Project: Health Care in Diverse Communities elective

Project: Health Care in Diverse Communities elective
Fellow: Nona Mei
Mentor: Sharon Younkin, Patricia Tellez-Giron
Team: Sahar Abdelrahman
Agency:

Fellow Bio:

Project Description:

HCDC is a spring elective that is offered to medical students and other health professional students that addresses the issues of diversity and cultural humility in the health care setting. This is accomplished through guest lecturers, class discussions, outside experiences, reflective journaling, and readings. This is the second year that the class will be offered, and Sahar and I took it over for spring 2005 from the founding mothers of the course: Cristina Delgadillo, Li Cowell, and Elizabeth Felton.

Project Goals:

This course is the beginning of an attempt to fill in the gap that is cultural competency in our medical education. We brought in speakers from the blind, deaf as well as LGBT communities to really challenge students' perceptions of the term "diversity". The small class size (no more than 15) allowed for in-depth discourse which we we felt was critical to the processing of this kind of information. We also required students to do one outside of class experience to further expand their understanding/appreciation of diversity in medicine. Students were encouraged to either shadow doctors who worked with diverse populations, or to shadow a medical interpreter. We wanted to stress that this course in no way is comprehensive nor can replace the life-long process of cultural competency and humility, but rather serves as the beginning of an awareness of the importance of this issue as health care professionals.

Accomplishments:

To date, we have successfully seen this course come to fruition this last semester (spring 2005). In order to accomplish this, we contacted all the speakers (about 10 or so) to coordinate times with them and also to tell them about our goals for the course, as well promote and advertise the elective. We have updated the syllabus from the previous year, as well as add a supplemental reading packet. This year there have been some changes in the administrative standpoint in that now they will also be involved in implementing cultural competency training into the curriculum. Nevertheless, we still felt that there was a strong need for this elective and so a few M2 leaders will be undertaking this project for the spring 2006 session.

Challenges and Solutions:

It was challenging to coordinate all the speakers schedules and make sure that they understood our goals for the course, so that it was in alignment with their lecture. The big thing that we changed from the previous year was that we limited the time that the speakers had for their presentations and increased the time for class discussion.

Next Steps:

Locus Project Objectives and Key Tasks	Target Date for Completion

Resource Needs:

Last update:

December 20, 2005

Graduation Requirements Progress Chart

If you complete the requirements outlined below, you will graduate as a LOCUS fellow.

A check indicates the item has been completed.

When	What	On-line
Year 1: Beginning of Semester 2	New Project Report	Submit Report
Year 2: Beginning of Semester 1	Project Update	Submit Update
Year 2: Beginning of Semester 2	Project Update	Submit Update
Year 3: Beginning of third year	Project Update	Submit Update
Year 4: August of fourth year	2-3 page final summary of project that includes a reflective evaluation of the project process	N/A
Ongoing	Participate in program evaluation (written and/or focus group)	View Options
By the end of fourth year	Select poster, presentation, paper, creative option or your own idea	View Options