And we're back! Meeting up with Dr. Burt

Hello everyone!

After going through third year of medical school and a few board examinations, we are back to continue our research. After an intensive year of clinical work, the fourth year of medical school gives us more time and opportunities to pick up where we left off.

We wanted to document one of our first meetings with Dr. David Burt, our research mentor. Based on our research from the summer of 2013, we found that it could be beneficial to have highly trained and skilled health promoters who would be able to help individuals navigate the health system at UVA. We discussed the potential development of a para-curriculum that would add to the community health worker training that is already provided through the health department. We plan to perform background research on effective navigators and curricula. From this research, we will develop a survey instrument that would gauge the opinions and thoughts of local organizations and community members. We believe that this will help us create a thoughtful and informed curriculum that will address the specific needs of the Charlottesville community.

We outlined our plan of attack for the next few months.

• June/July: Melissa and I will review our past projects and cap off any loose ends we have from our previous research. We plan to work with our GSP research mentors to refine this data. This will help build a foundation for the next steps of our research. We will also plan to meet with Dr. Max Luna, another mentor who has spent a considerable amount of time working with local Latino communities in Charlottesville.
• July - August: During these months, we will be doing an academic literature review of different curricula to train high quality navigators and promoters.  We hope to enlist the help from one of our librarians at the health system library to make sure we are able to learn from previous programs and attempts. We also plan to informally meet with key individuals who would help guide the creation of our research instruments.
• September - October: Project proposal for M4 elective and IRB application will be sent in ideally on September 1st. We will also begin to develop our survey instruments to distribute to community organizations and members in regards to the potential creation of a para-curriculum.
• November: The month of November is our dedicated research time to implement our surveys. 
• December - Spring 2016: We hope that our data will be helpful as we think about creating a curricula for the development of trained health promoters/navigators. 

Melissa and I are excited for the next steps in the Global Health at Home initiative. Until next time!

-Steven Nguyen