Cultural Humility: Evaluation of the HEALER Training in a Student-Run Community Clinic

Academic mentors: Margarita Teran-Garcia

Community partner: Avicenna Community Health Center

Project description: 
Student-run clinics are unique collaborative environments with diverse volunteers and high turnover that serve a multicultural at-risk patient population. Cultural competence training is not enough to promote health equity in that learning environment, and we aim to incorporate the tenants of cultural humility. Cultural Humility is a lifelong learning process that needs to be nurtured with self-commitment and self-evaluation. The HEALER© training (Humility, Empathy, Awareness, Leverage, Empower, Reflect) was developed in collaboration with Integrated Health Disparities Programs (IHD) to serve that need. IHD Programs at University of Illinois Extension has strongly advocated for cultural humility and bias training with various state-wide partnerships. Avicenna Community Health Center is a local student-run clinic with volunteers from multiple majors at the University of Illinois, medical students from the Carle Illinois College of Medicine, and the University of Illinois College of Medicine at Urbana-Champaign. We want to investigate the impact of this project on service satisfaction and training experience. METHODS: In collaboration with IHD and Avicenna Community Health Center, a pilot program was launched in Spring 2022, utilizing the HEALER© toolkit as a quality improvement and professional development opportunity. Since then, more than 40 volunteer students have participated in the HEALER© training, with several evaluative focus groups, and pre/post evaluations of students and preceptors to assess the changes in cultural humility scales that need to be refined. The proposed project strives to refine the existing training, and to tailor it for the current needs of the student-run clinic volunteer and new patient population. In the future, new training modules with case vignettes need to be developed, implemented and evaluated at other student-run or volunteer clinics in the community.

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