The School of Nursing and Health Studies is training students to be global health disparities scientists with help from a five-year Minority Health International Research Training Program (MHIRT) grant, funded by the NIH’s National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities.
From February 27 to March 1, 2019, Principal Investigator Johis Ortega, PhD, associate dean for Hemispheric and Global Initiatives and associate professor of clinical, led a final advisory meeting for MHIRT at the school (SONHS). He welcomed host institution faculty research mentors representing Australian Catholic University in Australia, the University of the West Indies in Jamaica, Universidad de Alicante in Spain, and Pontificia Universidad Católica Madre y Maestra in the Dominican Republic. SONHS faculty mentors, and past and present MHIRT student research participants also attended.
Dr. Ortega explained that MHIRT gives diverse students the opportunity to spend eight weeks conducting research at foreign institutions of higher education, bolstering the school’s commitment to a national mandate calling for diversification of the scientific workforce—a crucial step toward achieving health equity in the 21st century.
Amir Davoodi and Kemika Lundy are among the 10 SONHS students selected for the final MHIRT group and recently learned they will spend their summer at Australian Catholic University. During the three-day gathering, they talked with fourth-year nursing student Antonio Sanchez Gonzalez (MHIRT 2018) about his experience conducting research there last summer under the guidance of leading stroke care implementation researcher Sandy Middleton, PhD.
“I was never exposed to research before,” he said. “The opportunity to take part in this program was outstanding. The [research] team they have [at ACU] is such a cohesive unit.”
Sanchez Gonzalez conducted literature reviews and analyzed a subset of data related to the health impact on caregivers of stroke survivors. His research poster was among those on display during the MHIRT “Research Day,” held February 28. Dr. Middleton, professor of nursing and director of the Nursing Research Institute St. Vincent’s Health Australia (Sydney) and Australian Catholic University, presented the Research Day lecture, titled “Is it possible to change clinician behavior and implement evidence-based care?”
“Never did I think one study would lead to a big program of research,” admitted Middleton, whose 80 funded grants to date total over AUD$37 million. She explained how the Quality in Acute Stroke Care (QASC) protocol she leads in Australia has expanded to QASC Europe, with providers in 300 hospitals across a dozen countries now evaluating its impact. She also talked about her institution’s collaboration with SONHS through the MHIRT program, calling the partnership “really wonderful” and “a huge success.”
Zahira Quiñones, MD, and Jose Javier Sanchez, MD, have also served as research mentors at Pontificia Universidad Católica Madre y Maestra. They said the SONHS students they worked with through MHIRT were “very disciplined and well-prepared,” adding, “They were hungry to learn and do new things. They had high standards for the quality of their work and their ethics in the way they treated the data.”
The other host-country faculty mentors who attended the advisory meeting were Michelle Cambell, PhD (Australia), Eulalia Kahwa, PhD (Jamaica), and José Ramón Martínez Riera, PhD (Spain). Participating U.S. faculty mentors included co-investigator Nilda (Nena) Peragallo Montano, DrPH (UNC-Chapel Hill), and, from SONHS, program director Karina Gattamorta, PhD, Rosina Cianelli, PhD, Diego Deleon, MD, Juan M. Gonzalez, DNP, and Denise Vidot, PhD. For more information, email mhirt@miami.edu or call 305-284-1269.
*Research reported in this presentation was supported by the National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities of the National Institutes of Health under Award Number T37MD008647. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health.
