PHILADELPHIA (KYW Newsradio) — How do you tackle disparities in public health? Drexel University is trying to find out with the help of a $14.4 million, five-year grant from the National Institutes of Health.
Dr. Ana Diez Roux, dean of the Dornsife School of Public Health at Drexel, said the project addresses a very real problem in public health: One group tends to get better health outcomes than another.
“Health inequities are our differences … that we see across social groups that are linked that are unfair,” Diez Roux explained. “They are things that are addressable. … and there are many kinds of dimensions across which these inequities exist — certainly by race, by social class, by neighborhood, by sexual orientation, and gender identity.
“These differences are preventable,” she continued. “They’re not natural, they’re not genetic. They’re created by the way in which our society is organized.”
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Diez Roux said the grant will help Drexel work on addressing two big problems.
“One is to ensure that we have a diverse research workforce working in health, and to make sure that we support the development of investigators from many different backgrounds, particularly those investigators of color, in particular, who tend to be under-represented in many aspects of health research.”
The other goal: “It’s also about transforming universities and institutions so that they create environments that are more inclusive, more supportive of the development of faculty from different backgrounds, so that we can really make a difference in terms of our understanding of what drives patterns of health and population health.”
Drexel is one of six inaugural grant recipients nationwide, and the only one in Pennsylvania.
Listen to more with Dr. Diez Roux about Drexel’s grant, and why studying health disparities is important in the first place, all on this episode of the KYW Newsradio original podcast In Depth.