Envisioning Health Using Images to Enhance Latino Adolescent-Doctor Bonds

Univ Of North Carolina Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill NC

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Abstract

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The literature suggests that physician bias should be investigated as a cause of and intervention point for reducing health disparities. Interventions that target physician bias are necessary. This project brings together a trans-disciplinary leadership team including social work, art history/visual studies, public health, social psychology, and medicine to develop visual interventions with health care providers to decrease implicit bias among providers, improving the patient-provider relationship for Latino adolescents. This project targets pediatric residents. The intervention, Yo Veo Salud, uses both patient-generated images and images created by a photojournalist about the Latino health care experience. Visual scholars suggest that images provoke immediate, non-conscious reactions in viewers activating normally unvoiced emotions and viewpoints. Based on Johnathan Haidt's social intuitionist model, this project tests the hypothesis that images function in ways that targt implicit bias among pediatric residents. A sequential cohort design will be used in which some pediatric residents will function as controls and others' will receive the Yo Veo Salud intervention (total n = 80). Post- test self-report and implicit measures of attitudes and implicit bias will be collected and analyzed. A trans-disciplinary leadership core will be created to bring the humanities together with the social and behavioral sciences to create and test other visually- based arts and humanities initiatives to reduce health disparities and enhance quality of care. Aim 1) To describe the mechanisms by which visual interventions may enhance shared understandings of disease, illness, and treatment between pediatric residents and Latino adolescents. Aim 2) to test the impact of Yo Veo Salud on the attitudes and implicit bias of pediatric residents. Aim 3) to create a campus-wide trans-disciplinary consortium joining perspectives from the health sciences and the humanities to create an infrastructure to improve professional practices in the health sciences using visual interventions.