Bridging The Gap: A Primer for Teaching About Health Disparities

Abstract

By definition, geriatric psychiatrists (and other practitioners) care for patients who suffer from health care disparities, just by having a mental illness and by being an older adult. Although steps have been taken to introduce curricular content regarding health care disparities into undergraduate and graduate medical education, that content is usually limited, focusing on the role that race, ethnicity and gender have on health outcomes. Thus, the disparities brought about by having a mental illness, being an older adult and the intersection of those traits is not routinely covered. In order to better prepare our future health care providers and leaders to battle these health care disparities which are inherent in our patient population, we need to be well versed in the language of health care disparities and methods of instruction that can easily be integrated in our daily teaching activities.To this end, Drs. Nery Diaz, Paroma Mitra and Dennis Popeo offer a session that aims to address this shortcoming. Their session will begin with a brief primer on health care disparities in general (definitions, theoretical framework) and then briefly discuss the evidence base for some of the more serious disparities faced by the mentally ill, the older adult population and the intersection of these groups, as well as the intersection of the population of older adults who suffer from mental illness with race, ethnicity and gender. Next, the trio will provide a review of the literature surrounding effective measures of teaching about health care disparities, and some approaches to integrating these subjects into your established curriculum, and into your day-to-day teaching. Finally, they will introduce the general principles of equitable teaching – a framework built to address reducing disparities in the classroom - and show how this can be used to modify our existing educational and evaluative schema. There will also be time for questions and for participants to reflect on how they can incorporate what they learned into their educational practice at home.