Our health is influenced by education, poverty, housing, employment and neighborhoods. Immigrants in particular face a range of health-related challenges and significant barriers to healthcare access due to linguistic and cultural barriers that complicate communication in the healthcare setting. Immigrant individuals have historically had substantially lower access to mental health treatment services. COVID-19 further highlighted these existing health disparities.

Pandemic measures to limit exposure to COVID-19 largely focused on limiting interactions and increasing physical distance between individuals. The benefits of physical distancing, however, have long term psychological costs. Additionally, social unrest throughout the pandemic increased the need for mental health services within these communities.

This session will focus on mental health conditions among immigrant groups, current research and treatments, the use of mental health services and the public health response.

The COVID-19 pandemic revealed and amplified inequity both within and between families. For many families with school-aged children, remote learning was a source of inequities and significant source of stress. Based on the findings of a qualitative interview and study with parents of K-12 students across the U.S. between March and August 2020, this webinar will discuss inequities related to gender, family structure and disability status, with a focus on how these inequities impact the mental health of parents and children.

The ability to understand and personalize threats are key to getting people to adopt protective behaviors. COVID-19 presents a serious threat to health; however, unlike threats from other kinds of hazards, the virus does not offer any visible indication of its threat or presence. Compared to the physical damage inflicted by a flood or tornado, COVID-19 is invisible. Extended exposure to the virus threat and constantly changing environments further complicate the interpretation of built and social environments, formulation of risk perceptions and ultimately the adoption of protective behaviors that guard individual health and slow the spread of COVID-19.

In this session, panelists will explore the factors that drive risk perception among vulnerable populations — such as trusted information sources — by identifying what cues people use when there are no visible environmental cues and by examining changes over time as a novel event unfolds. Practical communication and training approaches for addressing an individual's risk perception in the clinical setting will be shared.

Community health workers are a powerful resource for addressing health disparities. They function as liaisons between communities and health and social services, facilitating access to services and serving as community advocates.

CHW interventions have been extensively evaluated and reported on, with significant evidence pointing to their effectiveness in a variety of contexts, including chronic disease management in culturally and linguistically diverse populations, maternal and child health and cancer treatment.

CHW champions and experts point to the crucially important contributions of CHWs in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. CHWs are uniquely positioned to communicate critical health information to underserved communities including racial/ethnic minorities, immigrants and economically disadvantaged individuals. CHWs can, among other vital tasks, dispel potentially harmful misinformation, adapt available information to make it culturally appropriate for the communities they serve and connect residents to services that address social determinants of health, including supports for food, housing and health and unemployment insurance.

Panelists will present findings associated with a study conducted in October through November 2020, drawing on interviews with CHWs, supervisors and CHW advocates from both upstate and downstate New York. This study examined the role of CHWs in response to the COVID-19 pandemic including how CHWs adapted their work to physical distancing requirements and evolving client needs, and the challenges they encountered in doing so. Implications for policy and practice related to CHW programs will be discussed.

Stopping the spread of an infectious disease requires, in part, widespread testing, successful tracking of infected individuals and adherence to isolation requests. The success of these methods is compromised not only by skepticism, hesitancy and general mistrust in healthcare by underserved patients, but also lack of access and limited cultural competence within the health system.

This session explores the impact of human behavior through the lens of the patient and practitioner through a series of discussions with contact tracing experts. The study focuses on the critical psychological characteristics of successful contact tracers and the psychological factors that impact the success of contact tracing. We will discuss the barriers created by distrust and misinformation, which help us understand resistance to contact tracing and the impact on broader healthcare policies.

Black and Latinx individuals historically have had substantially lower access to mental health treatment services. COVID-19 has highlighted these existing health disparities.

Measures to limit exposure to COVID-19 have largely focused on limiting interactions and increasing physical distance between individuals. The benefits of physical distancing, however, have psychological costs. Additionally, social unrest throughout the pandemic may increase the need for mental health services within racially and ethnically diverse communities.

This session will focus on mental health conditions among racial and ethnic groups, current research and treatments, the increased use of telemental health services and the public health response.

Drawing on interview material with frontline sexual and reproductive health providers and advocates, this session explores the deepening inequalities in access to and quality of sexual and reproductive healthcare during the first surge of the pandemic. It will also address implications for future policy and practice.

Information in this session is based on results of a qualitative study of the impact of COVID-19 on the provision of sexual and reproductive healthcare to minority groups in New York state March-October 2020.

Culturally and linguistically diverse communities are disproportionately affected by a wide range of social determinants of health. They are hard hit by economic instability, food insecurity, isolation, unsafe housing and poorly resourced neighborhoods. They must grapple with contextual and systemic forces that cut them off from systems of support and restrict access to sufficient educational tools that have become critical in remote and digital learning. They often face low health literacy and lack access to culturally and linguistically competent services.

COVID-19 lifted the veil on these disparities and dealt a heavy blow to many in these communities. As communities that are overrepresented in the service and healthcare industries, many are essential workers who are on the frontline of the fight against the pandemic. They have experienced less access to testing and higher levels of infections and fatalities. Many have also been disproportionately affected by unemployment during the pandemic.

In this webinar, panelists will highlight research evidence that documents the micro, meso and macro-level impacts of the failure to provide effective language assistance to these communities. They will present strategies, interventions and best practices to help:

• tackle social determinants of health;
• increase access for these communities to quality healthcare;
• improve health outcomes for this population; and
• strengthen the ability of the healthcare system to provide culturally and linguistically appropriate services.

Beyond the complex logistical task of prioritizing, distributing and storing COVID-19 vaccine, state and local governments must simultaneously devise transparent plans to prevent the minority health disparities that defined the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic from persisting into the vaccination phase.

Vaccine hesitancy – including within communities of color – is recognized as a significant hurdle to achieving herd immunity through widespread acceptance of a newly developed COVID-19 vaccine.

This session will explore vaccine hesitancy, which often arises from justified distrust rooted in the legacy of systemic racism and mistreatment at the hands of the medical community.

Panelists will address the characteristics of campaigns required to acknowledge and address historical injustices that drive distrust, emphasize understandable and culturally appropriate messages and tap existing community infrastructure, including community health workers, to utilize trusted voices to deliver timely and accurate information.

Panelists will draw on recent community-engaged research with healthcare professionals serving communities of color.

There is stark, though incomplete, evidence of racial and ethnic inequalities in the toll of COVID-19 on New Yorkers. COVID-19 fatality rates for Black and Hispanic New Yorkers are more than double those for white residents, with even greater disparities outside New York City. The rates of hospitalization, test-confirmed COVID-19 diagnosis and exposure in New York City also reveal substantial racial and ethnic disparities. Further, estimates based on the available data suggest important differences in the way these disparities manifest for groups at different stages of the disease — from exposure to death or recovery.

This panel will present findings from recent examinations of the extent of disparities, in New York state and elsewhere, and share insights on how expansions to baseline data could build new understanding about inequalities in the spread of the virus in order to devise public health interventions that account for each demographic group’s unique experience.