Pitt’s Center for Minority Health (CMH), housed in the Graduate School of Public Health (GSPH), is cosponsoring the National Leadership Summit on Eliminating Racial and Ethnic Disparities in Health being held today through Jan. 11 in Washington, D.C.

The 2006 summit, titled “Embracing a Common Destination: Improving Health Outcomes for All Americans,” is hosted by the Office of Minority Health of the Department of Health and Human Services.

“For CMH to be the academic cosponsor for the 2006 Summit in Washington, D.C., is fitting as we were first to bring federal officials and health professionals together five years ago in Pittsburgh,” said Stephen Thomas, director of CMH and the Philip Hallen Professor of Community Health and Social Justice in GSPH.

CMH staff will present a plenary session from 8 to 10:30 a.m. Jan. 10 titled “Overcoming Barriers to Building Community Trust: Engagement for Eliminating Health Disparities.”

“By highlighting the central role of community partners to development, implementation, and evaluation of interventions that are tailored to community needs, we will demonstrate how small steps can lead to great rewards in generating community ownership of health promotion and disease prevention programs,” Thomas said.

The panel also will highlight the significance of local foundation support during early stages of program development.

“Pittsburgh is blessed with forward-thinking foundation leaders who have invested more than $1.4 million in efforts to eliminate health disparities,” Thomas noted.

Members of the panel include Thomas, CMH Associate Directors Mario Browne and Angela Ford, and CMH Project Director Sekai Turner. Panelists will cite examples of CMH’s national prominence as a leader in community-based and grass-roots efforts to eliminate health disparities.

For example, CMH’s Healthy Black Family Project has enrolled more than 2,000 participants since June 2005. CMH’s “Take a Health Professional to the People Day” utilizes barbershops and beauty salons in African American neighborhoods as communication portals and venues for health professionals to conduct medical screenings and provide health education. The barbers and salon operators are trained as lay health advocates to form a bridge between the community and health resources at Pitt.

“The strength of the model is in its simplicity and seamless connection to the cultural fabric of the Black community,” said Thomas.

Among the unique programs and strategies implemented by CMH are community-based interventions that range from development of culturally tailored health communication materials designed to address an individual’s risk behaviors to media advocacy—using mass media to advocate for policy change.

With leadership from The Pittsburgh Foundation, the Funders Forum on Health Disparities was established in 2002 in support of the innovative efforts designed by Thomas and his team.

With team leadership from CMH Associate Director Ford and community partners, CMH established “Health Disparity Working Groups” as an ongoing infrastructure to plan and evaluate implementation of local grass-roots efforts to celebrate the annual National Minority Health Month each April, when innovative strategies aimed at promoting health and preventing disease are deployed across greater Pittsburgh.

For more information on the National Leadership Summit on Eliminating Racial and Ethnic Disparities in Health, visit www.omhsummit2006.org.