Anika Garter
Pronouns: she/her
Research Mentor(s): Tsu-Yin Wu
Research Mentor School/College/Department: Eastern Michigan University School of Nursing / Other
Program: UROP
Session: Session 7 (4:40pm – 5:30pm)
Authors: Anika Garter, Tsu-Yin Wu, Rachel Bessire
Abstract
Many Asian Americans living throughout the United States are faced with various health disparities due to language barriers, education, income, race, ethnicity, and geographic location. Due to these factors and others, many Asian groups do not receive the health care they should which is a major problem. The Healthy Asian Americans Project (HAAP), a part of the Center for Health Disparities Innovations and Studies (CHDIS), helps address these various health disparities faced by Asian Americans through research, education, and community events. One important health aspect that the CHDIS nutrition team focuses on is diabetes and reducing the risk among Asian Americans. An educational training is being conducted in order to optimize awareness of diabetes risks among underserved communities/groups. This new method consists of utilizing community health workers (CHWs) in place of professional health care providers to educate people on diabetes. CHWs are public health workers who usually share the same ethnicity, life experiences, and language as those they are serving. For this reason, having CHWs educate different groups on diabetes health information could be more beneficial since a language and culture barrier would not be an issue. In this study, a group of CHWs from refugee African, Arab, and Asian Americans will be receiving a CHDIS-developed diabetes education program. In order to gauge the success of the training, pre- and post- tests will be utilized in order to determine if diabetes knowledge and skills of CHWs increases. The expected outcome is that CHW’s knowledge on diabetes will increase after receiving training, and this will consequently allow them to educate members of their community, thus improving diabetes education and awareness among diverse communities/groups. As briefly previously mentioned, this research is imperative as it has a great potential to improve the education of various racial groups on diabetes—a disease in which 1 in 10 people living in America face.
