Feb. 21—A six-part training series meant to help reduce health disparities experienced by Alaska’s communities of color kicked off this week on Zoom — and organizers say it has the potential to bring more awareness and improve trust and health outcomes in the state.

The series, hosted by the Alaska Black Caucus and the University of Alaska Anchorage, was made possible through a $1.15 million grant that the caucus received this summer from the Municipality of Anchorage to address long-standing health inequities that have been exacerbated during the COVID-19 pandemic.

“We know that health disparities are huge for people of color. Not just in Alaska, but throughout the world,” said Celeste Hodge Growden, president of the Alaska Black Caucus.

The goal of the series is to help bring awareness to health providers about biases they may not know they have by helping them understand the roots and causes of the problem.

Learning to talk about race in a productive way is an important first step toward reducing life-or-death health disparities and improving interactions between underserved communities and health care providers, Growden said.

“I think about my mother, who has now passed away, but being dismissed when she continued to share what was happening to her, and just not receiving the care and concern that could have saved her,” Growden said.

“She had gone to the doctor for years,” Growden said. “And had she been diagnosed early, she would still be with us today.”

The idea for the series came from a desire to connect directly with health care workers in Alaska, Growden said. The caucus reached out to the Center for Human Development at the University of Alaska Anchorage, which hosts dozens of ECHO — or extension for community healthcare outcomes — sessions each month focused around health.

The goal of an ECHO is to create “a space where providers can learn from each other and from community members, and from individuals with lived experiences,” said Jessica Harvill, ECHO Project Director with the university. “It really is designed to democratize knowledge between providers and the community and other specialists.”

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The target audience of this particular series is health care workers, though Growden said anyone from the community who’s interested in learning more about the history of racism and medicine and how that’s shaped current practices is welcome to attend the series, which is free.

Those who can’t attend the sessions live are able to watch the recordings.

The first of six sessions was held this past week and featured a presentation by Dr. Italo M. Brown, an emergency room physician and an assistant professor at the Stanford University School of Medicine.

More than 300 people have registered so far for the series — and over 100 tuned in live for the first two-hour session, Harvill said.

The presentation included an overview of the ways in which race and racism affect medicine and health care, and historical context for the current climate.

Deanne Woodard, a program manager with the Alaska Black Caucus, said she thought the first session went very well.

“Quite a few people were surprised by the the types of implicit biases that are present that they didn’t even realize were there,” she said. “I think most were very grateful from what I could see to learn … things that aren’t taught in medical school.”

Erinn Barnett, a program manager with the ECHO program, described the session as important and effective.

“I think he really powerfully spoke to the ways that racial bias has been a part of medical teaching and medical practice from from early on, and how even today where we might not be directly aware of how those biases have been integrated so deeply, they still linger,” Barnett said.

“There was a lot of direct engagement and expression of desire for these conversations to continue,” Barnett added.

Barnett said that so far, the feedback has been overwhelmingly positive and that participants have expressed a “deep desire” for these kinds of conversations to happen publicly.

Looking ahead at future sessions — which include a look into the ways health disparities have grown during the pandemic, what “trauma-informed care” looks like, what it would take to help improve access to health care for communities of color, and more broadly what health equity could mean for Anchorage and beyond — the organizers said they have visionary goals for what the project’s outcomes could be.

“I think my greatest hope is that we help current practitioners and clinicians and staff who work with the BIPOC population become more conscious of their own implicit biases, because we all have them,” said Woodard, the Alaska Black Caucus program manager. “And that in that consciousness, they are able to find more empathy and more patience, and take a moment to recognize and really see the patient — and not be led by stereotypes or assumptions.”

The next session will be held at 6 p.m. March 10 and will focus on how the COVID-19 pandemic has accentuated systemic racism in health care. Health care workers and members of the public can register for free here.