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“We built this equitable model to address disparities in infectious disease, but what are our plans for sustainability?”
I get this question almost every time I present about a community-based model I developed in partnership with faith-based organizations to address vaccine equity disparities within vulnerable Southern California Black communities. . The question shocked me the first time I was asked it. I had to sit with myself and be honest about my goals for the intervention, and I had a list of questions running on a loop in my head.
The most salient one was, “How can we maximize our interventions to serve other minority communities?” Because that was the ultimate destination. After racking my brain for an answer, it became clear that there was only one solution to this dilemma. It is essential for me to pass on the knowledge about vaccine equity gained from my intervention efforts to other health care professionals, particularly the students I teach at the UC San Diego Skaggs School of Pharmacy and Pharmacy.
More importantly, it is very important to me to transform health equity education into something that students can easily learn by ensuring they identify practical opportunities to apply their knowledge. It means that it is important.
Build a course that incorporates important principles and life experiences
Insights from this internal conversation led to Exploring the Intersections of Racism, Antimicrobial Resistance, and Vaccine Equity. This course is an elective course launched in April 2024 for pharmacy and medical students that focuses on how social determinants of health inequalities influence disparities in infectious diseases .
I quickly realized that the most difficult part of developing a course was creating the storytelling to deliver the material. As a pharmacokinetics and pharmacodynamics researcher and educator, disseminating stock-focused information was unfamiliar. Therefore, I relied heavily on the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Principles for Communicating About Health Equity Concepts. these are:
Meet your audience where they are. Communicating health equity as “our” issue. Set health equity as achievable.
Each principle includes tips for applying it when discussing health equity. With this guidance, we created a working framework to guide content creation for each lecture deck.
I began each presentation by integrating my personal life experience as a minority in the United States. This allowed us to address concepts such as equality, fairness, racism, and bias, and ultimately adapt our initial CHEC principles to where our audience is. To advance my presentation, I weaved data from existing literature to communicate health equity as an “our” issue, or the second CHEC principle. Finally, each lecture concluded with specific examples demonstrating successful interventions that addressed the differences highlighted in earlier sections of the presentation.
This framed CHEC’s third principle, health equity, as achievable. For example, the first lecture of this course focused on the role of health professionals in identifying social determinants of health and disparities. Following the above framework, I began my lecture with a story about my upbringing in Detroit, Michigan and the housing segregation I experienced as a child. I explained how residential segregation made a difference in access to education and health care.
Moving from personal experience, I intentionally focused on HIV and shared key findings from several research papers that describe the impact of residential segregation on health and transmission of infectious diseases. I concluded my presentation with references that discuss pharmacist-led, community-based interventions to address healthcare access barriers for HIV pre-exposure prophylaxis in vulnerable communities. I used this framework for each successive lecture I created and delivered in the course.
Impact assessment and next steps
Because this was a new course and teaching method for me, I wanted to explore whether the material influenced students’ perceptions and attitudes regarding racism, and its implications for antimicrobial resistance and vaccine equity. We also incorporated a research element. We also wanted to understand the impact of this class on students’ perceptions of their role in addressing the inequalities discussed throughout the course.
The study included knowledge-based questions about social determinants of health, antimicrobial resistance, and vaccine equity, as well as pre- and post-intervention questions about students’ interest and confidence in participating in community-based interventions. It was an independent study. Addressing health inequalities.
Although results have not yet been announced or published, I noted that 33 students participated in the pre/post survey study and their post-intervention ratings on knowledge-based questions increased by 20% from baseline . 90% of students reported that they were “very likely” to participate in a community-based health intervention after completing the course. We intend to review and refine the materials before they are available in spring 2025. However, the preliminary results provide modest support for the proficiency of the content provided, increasing our confidence in using this framework to develop course content.
As ID professionals, we must pass on what we have learned to the next generation. I hope the lessons I learned while creating this course will help others advance their equity-centered learning and interventions.
Photo: Jacinda C. Abdul-Mutakabbir PharmD, MPH teaches students enrolled in the course “Exploring the Intersections of Racism, Antimicrobial Resistance, and Vaccine Equity” to address health inequalities. We are giving a presentation on the developed intervention.
