Carolina, Duke Are Partners In Broad Health-Care Study

Posted on Feb. 8, 2006

The N.C. GlaxoSmithKline Foundation has awarded $1.65 million to UNC and Duke University for a collaborative partnership to address four pressing local and global health-care concerns: quality of care and patient safety, health disparities, global health with an emphasis on HIV/AIDS, and mental health care.

The collaboration pools the resources of UNC’s schools of medicine and public health, Duke University Medical Center and Duke’s Terry Sanford Institute of Public Policy to design and implement educational and research initiatives that promise long-term public health improvements in each of the four areas.

Plans for the first area – quality of care and patient safety – include developing an interdisciplinary training curriculum for students in the health-care professions at Duke and UNC, simulated teamwork exercises and best practices aimed at eliminating care-related disparities and improving quality of care and patient safety. At the end of the grant period, the curriculum will be available for national dissemination by CD-ROM or Internet.

A key component of area two – health disparities – is community engagement to identify needs and develop solutions. Both UNC and Duke currently have major community-based initiatives at sites in the state. Building on these with the aim of reaching underserved African-Americans and the growing Latino population, efforts will focus on coordinating wellness activities, developing new models for chronic disease prevention and care management, and training students and community health-care providers.

Area three – global health and HIV/AIDS – will build on well-established UNC and Duke research and education programs in Malawi and Tanzania, respectively, to develop models that can be applied to both the African AIDS pandemic and to North Carolina, where rates of infection continue to climb among underserved populations. The project seeks to design culturally appropriate research projects to understand and address cultural, economic and other barriers to effective HIV/AIDS prevention and treatment, and to involve faculty, fellows, and residents in community-level education, care and research.

Area four – mental health and community-based training – focuses on a critical need for training and reform as North Carolina transitions from a state-funded and state-administered mental health care system to one that is privatized. In collaboration with the N.C. Division of Mental Health, Developmental Disability and Substance Abuse Services, UNC and Duke each will provide a senior psychiatry resident and faculty member to lead the development of extensive training curricula for new and existing community mental health providers. Using emerging evidence-based practices, the goal is to equip a work force of mental health-care professionals to care for seriously ill patients in nonhospital community settings.

The three-year grant period began Jan. 6 and includes a six-month planning period followed by 30 months of implementation, evaluation and results dissemination for each of the four health-care areas of concern.