Celebrating the Achievements of the Minority Health Disparities Engaged Researchers Collaborative and Making Connections to NYKids Research on Human-Centered Design
By Kristen C. Wilcox
A Milestone Luncheon celebrating the achievements of the Minority Health Disparities (MHD) Engaged Researchers Collaborative was held on September 24th in the University at Albany’s Assembly Hall. NYKids’ most recent research on differential impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on the education workforce was directly influenced by this collaborative. In this blog we share highlights from the event including a focus on human-centered design and make connections between human-centered design principles and NYKids research findings
Recognizing Interdisciplinary, Interprofessional, and Interinstitutional Collaboration
Professor Theresa Pardo, Project Director of the Minority Health Disparities Engaged Researchers Collaborative began the gathering by acknowledging the work of the engaged researchers and the over 60 meetings the group has had since the pandemic started.
A Symposium, a three campus webinar series, the Healthcare Association of New York State (HANYS) seminars, and lightning talks among numerous other events all showed commitment for interdisciplinary, interprofessional, and interinstitutional collaboration. Numerous white papers, reports, and publications produced by the Collaborative are available online.
Quoting engaged researcher and University at Albany colleague Professor Janine Jurkowski, Dr. Pardo punctuated a core aspect of the work which is to “give voice to our community”.
After recognition of colleagues pivotal to keeping the Collaborative’s work progressing, Professor Pardo invited President Havidán Rodríguez to the podium. Remarks from President Rodríguez began with a call for recognition of the University at Albany’s long history of research on minority health disparities and how well positioned the University has been, and continues to be, to do community-engaged work.
Professor Pardo then introduced guest speaker Dr. Joshua Prasad to describe how the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) is approaching health disparities in the time of the pandemic.
Health Disparities, Poverty, Diversity, and Human-centered Designs
Joshua Prasad‘s role at HHS is Director for Health Equity Innovation. In his talk, he pointed to the need to address root causes of health disparities, and two of those being poverty and systemic racism.
- As discussed in previous NYKids blogs, the latest NYKids study examined the pandemic’s impacts on the education workforce. Our latest study report described statistically significant differences in educator stress and job dissatisfaction in schools serving higher percentages of children growing up in poverty. These schools also tend to serve larger percentages of children and families of color. Such findings indicate a need to redouble efforts to support educators serving our most vulnerable children and families.
Dr. Prasad also discussed the need for using more human-centered designs to solve our most complex problems particularly for the most vulnerable. While human-centered design can be defined in different ways, core design principles include:
- Paying close attention to user experiences and needs
- Engaging stakeholders early and then throughout the design process
- Systematically addressing different levels of a system
In NYKids studies of a diverse set of schools with exemplary college and career readiness outcomes, we found the important connections between better outcomes for children and youth and the enacting of human-centered design principles. For instance, one major finding from our college and career readiness study was regarding the shared focus on co-constructing a humanizing school community. The follow up student study provided evidence from students’ points of view about how a humanizing school community encourages young people to develop agency, forge harmonious relationships with others, and build a number of 21st century skills and competencies.
For more information on this topic, see this tutorial on human-centered designs.
Also coming soon: check out the Educational Policy and Leadership department’s spring course offerings on using human-centered design principles in network improvement communities (EPL 663 with K.C. Wilcox). This course is ideal for groups of individuals in an organization as well as individual leaders of improvement initiatives. Reach out directly to kwilcox1@albany.edu for more information.
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