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In order to highlight pockets of excellence across the country, the NNED selects a partner organization to highlight once a month. Albuquerque Area Indian Health Board, Inc. has been selected as the Partner of the Month for November in celebration of National Native American Heritage Month. 

Albuquerque Area Indian Health Board, Inc. (AAIHB) is an Indian-owned and operated nonprofit organization that serves tribal communities in New Mexico, southern Colorado, and west Texas. They offer diverse health promotion and prevention educations programs, as well as specialized public health services. Their goal is to positively impact the health and well-being of the communities they serve. 

The programs and services that are currently offered include: 

• Intergenerational Intertribal (I²) Positive Solutions for Native Health – This program aims to decrease suicide and substance misuse among American Indian youth, through age 24, who have been impacted by trauma.
• Southwest Tribal Institutional Review Board – The primary purpose of an institutional review board (IRB) is to protect the rights and welfare of people who participate in research activities. 
• STD/HIV/AIDS Prevention & Education Program – The intent of this program is to provide education, training services & technical assistance to the seven tribal communities to which AAIHB provides direct services. 
• The Albuquerque Area Southwest Tribal Epidemiology Center – The Center provides technical support to all 27 Tribes in the Indian Health Service Albuquerque Area and offers various public health programs. 
• Audiology Program – This program provides hearing testing and hearing aid services to Tribal communities in New Mexico and Southern Colorado. 
• The Southwest Tribal Native American Research Center for Health (NARCH) – The Southwest Tribal NARCH supports partnerships between Southwest tribes/tribal organizations and academic institutions to conduct public health research. 

Learn more about the Albuquerque Area Indian Health Board, Inc. and the variety of programs they offer that advocate on behalf of American Indians through the delivery of quality health care services, which honor spiritual and cultural values. 

View a list of previous NNED Partners of the Month.

The Department of Veterans Affairs Pacific Island System is unlike few other medical systems in the world.

Based in Hawaii, it spans approximately 2.6 million square miles and is responsible for all veterans of the U.S. armed forces residing in Hawaii, American Samoa, Guam and the Northern Marianas.

Dr. Adam Robinson, the system’s new director, arrived this summer to take on the job amid a raging COVID-19 pandemic. The retired admiral, who served as the Navy’s 36th surgeon general, said his work cuts across three time zones and the international dateline.

Taking the helm of the VA’s Pacific Island System comes with both unique challenges and responsibilities. In a study of 2003 recruiting data Pacific Islanders at the time were over-represented in the U.S. Army by 249% proportionally to other ethnic groups. Pacific Islanders were also over-represented in rates of those killed and injured in Iraq.

The post-9/11 generation of veterans in particular has faced unique hurdles as they try to reintegrate into society even as war continues. For over two decades troops have continuously deployed to farflung conflict zones including Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Somalia and other countries.

Today less than 1% of Americans serve in the military, in some cases leaving the burdens to intergenerational military families. Many younger veterans have reported feeling isolated from and forgotten by a civilian society. Even before the pandemic, unemployment among post-9/11 veterans was on the rise.

“When you send people to war, they have injuries of the body. And they also have injuries of the mind. They have injuries, also, of the spirit,” Robinson said. “Those are moral injuries of war that occur. And that is a real injury, and it really is something that we need to care for.”

Robinson said that the VA has come a long way in better differentiating the different causes of mental and emotional problems that veterans can face as they try to reintegrate into society. Stay home orders related to the pandemic have exacerbated feelings of isolation. 

But Robinson said that telemedicine and online tools can better reach people in their homes, whether it’s for mental health care or physical ailments.

Read more on CivilBeat.org.

A panel of experts in psychiatry, business, and leadership development discussed the complexities of supporting the mental health of young people of color in the workplace during the COVID-19 pandemic at a School of Public Health event Tuesday.

The event, titled “Innovating in the Workplace: Supporting Mental Health of a Young People of Color During COVID-19 and Beyond,” marks the latest installment in the School of Public Health’s “Policy Controversies” series. The School of Public Health’s The Forum partnered with the Steve Fund and GBH News to host the online event.

Phillip W. Martin, a senior investigative reporter at the GBH News Center, moderated the event.

Panelists included Linda Akutagawa, president and CEO of Leadership Education for Asian Pacifics; Damien A. Hooper-Campbell, the chief diversity officer at Zoom; Joan Steinberg, president of the Morgan Stanley Foundation; and Sarah Y. Vinson, founder of the Lorio Psych Group and associate professor at the Morehouse School of Medicine.

Speaking about the data, Martin said that “according to the CDC, 30 percent of Black and 35 percent of Hispanic people polled reported experiencing symptoms of trauma and stress-related disorders like PTSD as a result of the pandemic.”

Vinson said employers can foster diversity by developing a specific mindset. She said they should be “thinking about the fact that it’s not just one box, but that each person brings these different categories and that there’s interplay between them.”

“In this time, there are already so many problems with our economic situation in terms of everyone entering the workforce, but students of color, of course, face particular challenges and inequities that are just exacerbated by the pandemic,” said Lisa Mirowitz, the Executive Producer and Director of the Leadership Studio at the School of Public Health, who helped organize the event.

In an interview before the event, Akutagawa discussed the importance of the panel’s topic.

“Mental health is an issue that is oftentimes not spoken about,” she said. “Relative to many other people, we find that particularly young adults of color are less likely to speak about mental health issues, including Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders.”

Read more on TheCrimson.com.

Very rural areas in the United States have fewer mental health services for young people, yet that’s where the help is needed the most, says a study led by Janessa Graves of the Washington State University College of Nursing, published last week in JAMA Network Open.

Previous studies have shown that the suicide rate among young people in rural areas is higher than for urban youth and is also growing faster, said Graves, associate professor and assistant dean for undergraduate and community research.

Yet by one measure, using ZIP Codes, only 3.9% of rural areas have a mental health facility that serves young people the study found, compared with 12.1% of urban (metropolitan) and 15% of small-town ZIP Code Tabulation Areas.

Measured by county type, 63.7% of all counties had a mental health facility serving young people, while only 29.8% of “highly rural” counties did.

“Youth mental health is something that seems to be getting worse, not better, because of COVID-19,” said Graves. “We really need these resources to serve these kids.”

While Graves’ study focused on suicide prevention services offered in mental health facilities, “even less intensive services like school mental health therapists are lacking in rural areas,” she said.

Concluded the study, “Given the higher rates of suicide deaths among rural youth, it is imperative that the distribution of and access to mental health services correspond to community needs.”

Read more on News.WSU.edu.

As the coronavirus swept into Detroit this spring, Wayne State University junior Skye Taylor noticed something striking. On social media, many of her fellow Black classmates who live or grew up in the city were “posting about death, like, ‘Oh, I lost this family member to COVID-19,’” said Taylor.

The picture was different in Beverly Hills, a mostly white suburb 20 miles away. “People I went to high school with aren’t posting anything like that,” Taylor said. “They’re doing well, their family is doing OK. And even the ones whose family members have caught it, they’re still alive.”

How do COVID-19 infection rates and outcomes differ between these ZIP codes? she wondered. How do their hospitals and other resources compare? This summer, as part of an eight-week research collaborative developed by San Francisco researchers and funded by the National Institutes of Health, Taylor will look at that question and other effects of the pandemic. She’s one of 70 participants from backgrounds underrepresented in science who are learning basic coding and data analysis methods to explore disparity issues.

Data to address racial discrepancies in care and outcomes has been spotty during the pandemic, and it isn’t available for most of these students’ communities, which disproportionately bear the brunt of the virus. The participants are “asking questions from a perspective that we desperately need, because their voices aren’t really there in the scientific community,” said Alison Gammie, who directs the division of training, workforce development and diversity at the National Institute of General Medical Sciences.

Scientists from Black, Hispanic, Native American and other minority backgrounds have long been underrepresented in biomedicine. By some measures, efforts to diversify the field have made progress: The number of these minorities who earned life science doctoral degrees rose more than ninefold from 1980 to 2013. But this increase in Ph.D.s has not moved the needle at the faculty level.

Instead, the number of minority assistant professors in these fields has dipped in recent years, from 347 in 2005 to 341 in 2013. And some of those who have entered public health endure racial aggression and marginalization in the workplace — or, after years in a toxic environment, quietly leave.

“We really need to focus on making sure people are supported and find academic and research jobs sufficiently desirable that they choose to stay,” said Gammie. “There have been improvements, but we still have a long way to go.”

Read more at KHN.org.

In the United States, people of color have been disproportionately impacted by the coronavirus pandemic, and Native Americans are no exception. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, American Indian and Alaska Native people are 5.3 times more likely than white people to be hospitalized due to COVID-19, the largest disparity for any racial or ethnic group.

There are myriad reasons why Native Americans are particularly susceptible to the virus, including social inequities and disproportionately high rates of preexisting conditions – such as diabetes, heart disease, asthma and obesity – that can put them at extra risk of severe illness. Many also live in multigenerational homes with large families, which can make social distancing a challenge.

Access to quality health care is also an issue. The Indian Health Service, the federal agency that provides health services for many American Indians and Alaska Natives, is chronically underfunded and under-resourced. In 2018, most of its hospitals reportedly were operating with fewer than 50 total beds, while the agency had about 20% fewer doctors than what it believed was ideal.

While experts acknowledge the situation is dire, it’s impossible to know COVID-19’s true toll on the Native American community. Coronavirus data by race and ethnicity is notably incomplete; in late September, states reported race and ethnicity for just 74% of coronavirus cases and 89% of deaths on average, according to data from The COVID Tracking Project, a volunteer-run platform supported by journalists, scientists and other researchers.

Inconsistencies in how race and ethnicity are identified in states’ reporting of COVID-19 cases and deaths also limit analysis and understanding, with American Indians or Alaska Natives sometimes grouped into a broader category classification. And tribes themselves are not required to report all of the data they collect to the state.

In Minnesota, where U.S. News used support from the Solutions Journalism Network to explore how one Chippewa band and a medical clinic serving Native Americans were tackling COVID-19, American Indians have so far avoided the kind of crisis witnessed by their peers elsewhere.

Jackie Dionne, American Indian health director for the Minnesota Department of Health, says state officials and tribal leaders anticipated the disproportionately deadly effect the coronavirus could have on American Indian residents. And, she says, because elected tribal leaders knew that coronavirus cases in their communities would likely be severe, they worked together to emphasize preventative measures that would limit the virus’ spread and minimize the strain on hospitals.

“We’ve been working really diligently to test, contact-trace, investigate and quarantine as much as we can,” says Dionne, a member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians in North Dakota. “There was a big push made by tribal elected leaders to wear a mask, to not gather for sake of keeping our elders safe.”

Read more at U.S.News.com.