Community Research
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COmmuNity-Engaged SimULation Training for Blood Pressure Control (CONSULT BP)
The CONSULT BP study is an academic-community partnership that seeks to test the effectiveness of an educational intervention that provides clinician learners with implicit bias training, bias-reduction skills, and communication practice with vulnerable patients from communities of color and low socioeconomic status.
CONSULT BP evaluates if an educational intervention has the ability to help improve patient health in areas such as hypertension control. The study chose to focus on this because health disparities exist across many chronic diseases such as hypertension.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, health disparities are “preventable differences in the burden of disease, injury, violence, or opportunities to achieve optimal health that are experienced by socially disadvantaged populations”.
Barriers to hypertension control include many factors related to the medical environment, patients, and providers. Growing evidence shows that well-meaning providers can have implicit biases that can affect patient interactions and clinical decision-making.
Implicit bias is a term used to describe the unconscious cognitive processes that affects an individuals’ understanding, actions, and decisions. “Research shows that all individuals are susceptible to harnessing implicit associations about others based on characteristics like race, skin tone, income, sex, and even attributes like weight, and accents. Unfortunately, these associations can even go as far as to affect our behavior towards others, even if we want to treat all people equally…” (Ohio State University).
A key component of the CONSULT BP training is an opportunity for the clinical learners to practice the communication and skills to reduce bias in a clinical simulation center with standardized patients (SPs).
SPs are individuals who are trained to simulate medical conditions in patient encounters. At UMass Medical School, they work within the Interprofessional Center for Experiential Learning and Simulation (iCELS). They are coached on how to effectively teach, evaluate, and provide feedback to medical students, nursing students, residents and practicing clinicians on varying competencies.
Individuals from the community taking on the role of a SP are at the heart of the CONSULT-BP educational intervention.
Our Partners
To learn more about implicit bias, check out this NPR podcast episode: https://www.npr.org/2020/06/20/880379282/the-mind-of-the-village-understanding-our-implicit-biases
