Hunter College Uses AHRQ’s National Healthcare Quality Report and National Healthcare Disparities Report for Graduate Nursing Curriculum
Hunter College's Hunter-Bellevue School of Nursing in New York City uses AHRQ's National Healthcare Quality Report and National Healthcare Disparities Report as primary data sources for a foundation course required for graduate students.
Each semester, approximately 75 students enroll in the course, "Health Promotion and Disease Prevention in Diverse Populations."
"We've found the [AHRQ] reports to be inspiring for students and exceedingly helpful for them to learn about quality of care and disparities at the national level, and then to look at a population at the local level and develop an intervention to address the health risks and problems facing that local population," explains Joan Arnold, Ph.D., R.N., a professor of nursing at Hunter College.
The ÂÜÀòÊÓƵNational Healthcare Quality Report and the National Healthcare Disparities Report measure trends in effectiveness and efficiency of care, timeliness of care, and patient safety based on factors such as race and ethnicity, type of condition, and income level. The reports, mandated by Congress and issued annually since 2003, feature data compiled from more than 45 national sources.
Students usually choose to develop their community health assessment project based on disparity issues, due to the wide range of inequalities among New York City residents.
"Most of the time they will focus on the disparities, which are so well articulated in the reports," Dr. Arnold says. As an example, one student used the ÂÜÀòÊÓƵreports and local health department data to propose an intervention for stronger HIV prevention outreach for residents with mental health issues, because they were also shown to have the highest HIV rates.
Hunter College is the largest college in the City University of New York, located in Manhattan.
To learn more about AHRQ's National Healthcare Quality Report and National Healthcare Disparities Report, visit: http://www.ahrq.gov/research/findings/nhqrdr/index.html for NHQRnet, a Web site that has been redesigned to facilitate benchmarking and trending capabilities. It includes a data query tool to compare national- and state-level data.
