Grant to boost health studies at UNLV

Monday, Nov. 15, 2004 | 11:06 a.m.

The UNLV School of Public Health, in business since August, has secured a grant from the National Institute of Health that will be used to further the school's research goals.

The $1.2 million grant will allow UNLV to establish in the next three years a Center for Excellence for Health Disparities Research, which will focus on investigating what health care holes or barriers may be preventing some groups of people from receiving the care they need, Dr. Mary Guinan, interim dean of the school, said.

The grant is the largest single grant UNLV has received from NIH to date and one of 12 the institution has earned in the past five years.

"Getting our foot in the door is a great big step for UNLV in opening up other grant opportunities," Guinan said.

Much of the research at the center, which is unique to Nevada, will focus on the health disparities among minorities, Guinan said, but UNLV researchers will also be broadening the study to look at "any population that has disproportionately high health problems and low access to care."

That would include everything from studying why some ethnic populations are more prone to certain diseases than others to seniors who have trouble accessing care to differences between urban and rural residents, Guinan said.

"We haven't taken stock of what the community needs and we're not sure where the research will lead," she said.

Part of the initial grant will be used to assess what major disparities do exist in Clark County and in the state in order to pinpoint what further study needs to be done, Michelle Chino, a human ecology professor who will direct the new center, said.

Researchers will be working with several community organizations to get a better perspective on current needs and to gather what data is already available, Chino said. Once UNLV is able to better define what areas are major issues of concern for the community, researchers will be able to go after bigger grants to tackle those projects.

Chino, who became immersed in health-disparities research while studying diabetes in Native Americans on her native Laguna Pueblo reservation in New Mexico, said it's essential that the academic work of the university be transferred to help the community at large.

One of the major questions in health disparity research is: "How do we make the science accessible?," Chino said. "It's often not so much an issue of access to health care but access to health information."

Navigating the health care system can be daunting for anyone, Chino said, and even more so for those who have other barriers such as being poor or not understanding English. Health care workers need to find more effective ways to inform and educate people about ways they can improve their health or manage chronic diseases such as diabetes.

Such research is especially important in Las Vegas because of the city's high immigrant population, it's transient nature, and the large amount of service industry workers who either don't have health insurance or who don't know how to properly use it, Chino said.

"We really want to understand what's happening here," Chino said. "We are a growing urban environment in a state that still has a lot of rural and Western areas."

Two ongoing research projects will receive a boost from the funding, including Chino's work on how to best inform Native Americans of proper diabetes care. In the second project, UNLV researchers are studying what kind of follow-up care is available to women after they receive free breast and cervical cancer screenings.

Researchers will also look at how technology is being used in health care services and whether or not it's being used effectively, Chino said.

The initial grant money will help support several professors, graduate students and student research projects in the new School of Public Health. All of UNLV's health-related departments were recently integrated together under the division of health sciences and the school of public health was created to train students to be administrators in public health.