Minority health featured by Salud

Programa Salud, the Johns Hopkins University Homewood Campus Initiative for Hispanic and Latino Health, held its Second Annual Conference for Student Leadership on Saturday. The 2003 theme was "Alleviating Disparities in Minority Health Care through Outreach."

The conference featured guest speakers and workshops that presented the challenges facing new medical outreach programs, the benefits they have on minority healthcare and the importance of such programs in the future of the U.S. health system.

Gavi Bogin-Farber, coordinator for Salud, highlighted the group's mission: to promote healthcare for Hispanics and Latinos that is "culturally competent and culturally sensitive."

Bogin-Farber said last year's theme was cultural competency and then spoke about a similar student group at Goucher, "Hola," that works with local high school students.

The first keynote speaker was Thomas LaVeist, director of the new Center for Health Disparities Solutions at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

"Who you are determines how long you will live in the United States," he said.

With slides from the National Center for Health Statistics, he showed the disparities in health care services and outcomes between different racial groups and even between Hispanic subpopulations.

LaVeist pointed out the overall trend that the longer someone lives in this country, the more their health degrades and mirrors the health outcomes of white Americans. "There's something in this country that is producing this effect," he said. "We need to find out what this something is, and what we can do about it."

He said the top ten causes of death in the United States and then showed the top ten causes within the racial subgroups of white, black and Hispanic Americans. LaVeist provided more evidence of the underlying health-related and social disparities that all minorities face, stating, "We have more outreach work to be done."

The second speaker, Evelyn Rosario, spoke about the services that the Hispanic Apostolate provides, as she is the coordinator of their health services.

"I love this mission," she said, "because we all have gifts to share. The center was founded in 1963 to respond to the first wave of Cuban immigrants. The programs she spoke about included: English as a Second Language, Medical Services, Informational and Educational Programs, Immigration Legal Services, Employment Services and General Referrals.

The primary service is to teach immigrants English. There is also a large need for medical services, and she said they provide these vital services at an inexpensive cost or free of charge. The apostolate's clients face obstacles that might not be readily apparent to the rest of the population, Rosario said.

She also stated, "We will serve anyone who comes through the door" -- including Asians, Arabs and other immigrants.

Bill Tiefenworth, director of Volunteer Services, introduced the presentation by the members of Salud: Katherine Fox and Shanti Shenoy. They discussed the group's successes -- such as the cultural competency workshops for health providers in Baltimore they designed and the 24-hour-a-day interpreters that are available and on-call -- and the challenges they faced, including large hospitals' resistance to change and the possibility of differing goals between Salud and the targeted groups. They said they have learned that community outreach is an effective way to bring about change.

Cathleen Magill, a third-year medical student at Hopkins Medical School, spoke about the Substance Abuse Outreach Program. It is a program that was developed two years ago and was initially held at the Mattie B. Uzzle Outreach Center, which is a residential facility for men in substance abuse treatment programs. Magill held it up as a model for student-run programs. "What we did is we started a health education series, one day a week, for the men and women who come to that facility," she said. "We talk about things like hypertension, HIV/AIDS, the effects of drugs, hepatitis and we were also initially able to do screenings for people who walked in from the community and wanted to get into substance abuse treatment."

Jimmy Shiao, a third-year medical student at University of Maryland, is the co-founder of the Baltimore Community Medical Outreach. He described it as "a student-run program where we go into community centers ... and lead discussions on various health topics. [We] try to make it very interactive, so that we can teach them about health subjects, but then learn from them, in turn, about certain aspects of their lifestyle, circumstances, values that would give us a better idea of how we can approach them as health care providers or health care professionals."

"I was very satisfied with the conference," said Solera after the conference, "because it really shows how you can get a group of people together to achieve a specific goal."

Bogin-Farber said that she was pleased with the increased turnout at this conference compared to last year's conference.

"I really liked that we had a lot of Hopkins undergrads, because one of Salud's problems has been making a name for ourselves within the Hopkins community," he said.

Angelo Solera, Baltimore City Health Department's Hispanic Liaison involved in the original formation of Salud, said, "I think it's great because it shows that students can make a difference in the public health arena. A lot of times, people don't realize the potential that students have and this just people that it can be done -- with very little money, a lot of effort, but just with wanting to make a difference.