Adapting an Established Cultural Humility Training to a Student-Run Clinic Volunteer Population

Academic mentor: Grace L. Park & Margarita Teran-Garcia

Community partner: Avicenna Community Health Center

Project description: 
Cultural humility and bias training are important in working with diverse populations. However, often due to lack of time or resources, this type of training can be done in a generic way that is not tailored to a specific population. Student-run clinics are unique collaborative environments that include diverse volunteers with high turnover that serve a multicultural at-risk patient population. Current literature does not support cultural humility and bias training geared towards this specific setting. The University of Illinois Extension has strongly advocated for cultural humility and bias training in various state-wide partnerships like the Eastern Illinois Foodbank (EIF). The EIF has developed a toolkit with training modules distributed to food banks and partners across the state. Avicenna Health Center is a local student-run clinic with volunteers from various majors at the University of Illinois, medical students from Carle Illinois College of Medicine, and the University of Illinois College of Medicine at Urbana-Champaign. A pilot will be launched in Spring 2022 for a cohort of volunteers to implement the Extension's cultural humility and bias training, utilizing the EIF toolkit. The training will serve as a quality improvement and professional development opportunity.

We will implement cross-sectional focus groups of students and preceptors. The project will strive to refine the existing training and to tailor it for the current needs of the student-run clinic volunteer and patient population. In the future, the new adapted training modules can be implemented and evaluated at other student-run clinics in the community.

We will develop surveys to obtain feedback from all current and former volunteers from 2021 and 2022. Volunteers include both students and preceptors. We will implement focus groups with students and preceptor volunteers in separate sessions to give feedback on comfort levels regarding cultural humility and bias. A questionnaire for these focus groups will be developed and reported by thematic analyses. Based on the evaluation of those results, training will be updated and implemented for all new volunteers in fall 2022.    

Role of the Community-Academic Scholar:
The Community-Academic Scholar will be conducting a literature search on student-run clinics and cultural competency/bias training, which will inform the project design. They will work on the development of a survey tool for clinic volunteers and will develop questions for planned focus groups. Based on the results of collected data, the scholar will work on modifying the existing cultural humility training modules to be more tailored to the student-run clinic population and volunteer staff.