National REACH Coalition Webinar: Flipping the Paradigm: Community Leading Health Equity Efforts
On August 27th, the National REACH Coalition (NRC) in collaboration with Arizona Telemedicine Program at the Southwest Telehealth Resource Center and the Department of Health Promotion Sciences at the University of Arizona’s Mel and Enid Zuckerman College of Public Health held a webinar: Flipping the Paradigm: Community Leading Health Equity Efforts. The National REACH Coalition’s Charmaine Ruddock moderated a lively discussion exploring disparities and COVID-19, the leadership role of our communities in addressing them and the roles of public health departments, academia and the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) working with those communities in a new paradigm.
The panel featured: Leandris Liburd, PhD, MPH, MA, Chief Health Equity Officer (CHEO), Associate Director for the Office of Minority Health and Health Equity at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC); Dr. Danny TK Avula, MD, Director of the Richmond City and Henrico County Health Departments, and Pediatric Hospitalist at Chippenham Hospital; and Daniel Dawes, JD, Director of the Satcher Health Leadership Institute, Executive Director of Health Policy, Associate Lead for Government Relations and Professor of Health Law and Policy at Morehouse School of Medicine; and author of The Political Determinants of Health and 150 Years of Obamacare.
Charmaine provided grim statistics on how COVID-19 has affected communities of color. Nationwide, Black people are dying at 2.4x the rate of White people; and deaths per 100,000 people by race or ethnicity has been: Black or African American – 87, American Indian/Alaskan Native – 56, Hispanic or Latino – 53, Asian – 36, White – 36, Native Hawaiian or other Pacific Islander – 35 (from https://covidtracking.com/race).
Leandris Liburd remarked on the importance of getting the community involved from the start and how the REACH program allows one to tap into the knowledge of the local community. “The community knows what needs to get done, and can get it done quickly. But, there has been distrust in many communities, (i.e. Tuskegee Experiment), that distrust has been passed on from generation to generation so when we are working on providing a COVID-19 vaccine, we must help our communities to trust and believe that this vaccine will have more benefits than harm.” Leandris shared how the CDC’s Data on Call team provides COVID-19 data online and the CRAFT Teams report and respond to the COVID-19 data. For further reading, click here to read an article written by Leandris Liburd, Dr. H. Wayne Giles and Dr. George A. Mensah, Looking Through a Glass, Darkly: Eliminating Health Disparities.
Dr. Danny TK Avula echoed Dr. Leandris’ remark about distrust in communities. “When we talk to communities that have low vaccination rates, we find that it is not a lack of access to getting vaccinated, but that people don’t trust government and healthcare. After hearing this we have changed our approach when outreaching to the community. When Richmond became a COVID-19 hotspot, the CDC sent a Hispanic team to Richmond and gave us expertise on how to do community level surveying and the bilingual and bicultural elements made a huge difference in our approach.”
“Communities have power, lots of changes have been made as communities have pushed for changes in laws for them to get more equity,” said Daniel Dawes. “At Morehouse we believe that the people closest to the problem should be leading the solutions, and that would be the community. COVID-19 has not been striking all the communities, but as history has shown, black, immigrant and lower economic status communities are always hardest hit.” Daniel spoke about the grant from Google.org to Satcher Health Leadership Institute at Morehouse School of Medicine that will build a database detailing the breakdown of the virus’s impact by race, ethnicity, gender, socioeconomic status and other critical factors. Finally, Daniel cited his mentor, Dr. David Satcher on the importance of the work we are all doing to eliminate racial and ethnic health disparities: “We need leaders who care enough, know enough, and have studied these issues of inequity. We need leaders that have the courage to persevere and do something about it.”