The Ethnic and Rural Health Disparities (ERHD) has truly come along way since our start just a few years in 2010. With the support of the Department of Public Health at ECU and particularly the previous chairperson – Dr. Lloyd Novick — the ERHD program became established within the system of ECU as one of the unique online programs in the country. Once we began to enroll students in 2010 and 2011, I had a good feeling that we were paving a new way to provide graduate health professionals a higher level of expertise training in public health and medicine that was focused on issues such as health disparities, rural health disparities, ethnic and racial health disparities, global public health, qualitative research, cultural competency and African American health.
With the success of graduating outstanding ERHD students for four solid years, by 2014 I decided that our ERHD program needed to evaluate itself in the manner of an ERHD Alumni Study. With the assistance of our graduate assistant at the time — Shanekia Joyner — Shanekia and I along with Dr. Justin Moore developed the research project and surveyed as many graduates that had the time to complete our online survey.
In March, I presented the results of our 2014 ERHD Alumni Survey study at the Association of Prevention Teaching Research (APTR) Conference in Charleston, SC.. That was a major success and I received invaluable feedback and support from all the professionals who attended the conference.
Now we are receiving additional professional acknowledgment of our program from the Journal of Racial and Ethnic Health Disparities. The journal has published our research study as of September 2015 with an online version and later in 2016 the print (hardcopy) version will be printed in this professional academic peer-reviewed journal.
Here is the article and it is entitled, “A New Online Strategy in Teaching Racial and Ethnic Health and Health Disparities to Public Health Professionals.” After review, let us know what you think about our ERHD program by emailing me at: baileye@ecu.edu. We feel very proud of our online ERHD Graduate Certificate program and all those who have assisted us in varying capacities to keep it going from semester to semester and year to year.
I want to sincerely thank all those who have believed in our online ERHD Certificate Program, supported our program in the past and who are continuing to support our ERHD program for the future. I especially feel pleased and grateful for all of our OUTSTANDING ERHD GRADUATES!! Each one of you are THE NEW LEADERS in the field of PUBLIC HEALTH AND MEDICINE!!