Patients also contribute to racial disparities in care through cultural attitudes toward health care, as well as socioeconomic status, family situations, education and transportation issues.
This area, led by Briggett Ford, Ph.D., an assistant professor in the U-M School of Social Work, will evaluate the patient's role in health care disparities and look at how better coordinated and augmented prenatal care programs address possible social and environmental factors.
"When we think of 'multidisciplinary' in medicine, we usually mean two medical departments collaborating. With the resources and the longstanding collaborative spirit at the University of Michigan, we can truly make this effort interdisciplinary," Ransom says. "We've brought together people who have widely different perspectives to add focus to the issue of health disparities. These are people who have tackled other huge issues in the past and can bring a unique perspective to a question that the medical field alone has not been able to answer."
The U-M areas involved in the project are the Institute for Research on Women and Gender, the Program for Healthcare Improvement and Leadership Development, the Medical School, the School of Public Health, the Griffith Leadership Center, the Institute for Social Research, the Center for Research on Ethnicity, Culture and Health, the Institute for Social Research, the School of Nursing, the Center for Health Disparities, the Center for Health Promotion, the School of Social Work, the Stephen M. Ross School of Business, the School of Information, the College of Engineering, the Research Center on Poverty, Risk and Mental Health, and the departments of Obstetrics and Gynecology, Health Management and Policy, and Psychology.
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Contact: Nicole Fawcett
nfawcett@umich.edu
734-764-2220
University of Michigan Health System
8-Oct-2004