An ongoing failure of the health professions to successfully address health disparities in underserved populations has presented a formidable challenge for institutions to transform their fundamental culture and create an environment that will facilitate optimization of health care in minority populations. To meet this challenge requires recognition of the health-care deficits in the underserved populations and efficient transferring of new discoveries from academic institutions to use in the health care of these patient populations. While the reasons that academic institutions have failed to rise to this challenge include community mistrust (Section 5.A.), they also are related to lack of a sustained community-based research infrastructure, which limits research endeavors to episodic and project-specific engagement. This lack of infrastructure creates significant inefficiencies in initiating projects and often limits community participation to projects of lower complexity. Part of the infrastructural weakness is the absence, or fiscally necessitated underutilization, of the diverse resources essential for effective investigation of health disparities. With the establishment of a COE, we envisage a growing cadre of researchers pursuing epidemiological;clinical and Type 1 translational (aimed at specific problems inherent to minority populations, e.g. sickle cell anemia);and Type 2 translational research (often CBPR) devoted to a reduction of health disparities in underserved communities. To adequately serve this growing body of research, the UW CORES for Health Equity will provide a research core offering and, where necessary, providing funds for, the diverse resources essential to these investigations. Thus, the Goal for the Research Core is to create an environment that ensures that investigators performing population-based, clinical, and translational research studies in health disparate underserved populations have ready knowledge of, and access to, appropriate cutting-edge resources essential for performing such investigations.
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