Reaching New Heights: Strengthening Health Professions Research at a Majority Hispanic-Serving Institution

Project Summary Although health professions (allied health, nursing, social work, clinical psychology) represent more than 80% of the healthcare workforce, rigorous research within these fields, a cornerstone of evidence-based practice, is often trailing behind that of other medical professions. The urgency of closing this gap is amplified for health

professionals practicing in communities characterized by poverty, low educational attainment, health care access challenges and, consequently, poor health outcomes. Thus, building and strengthening HP biomedical research capacity is vital to improving health and addressing health disparities. The primary goal of the proposed study is to lay the foundation for a robust health professions research

environment at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley (UTRGV), one of the largest Hispanic-Serving Institutions in the nation. Located along the Texas-Mexico border, UTRGV serves one of the most economically disadvantaged and medically underserved regions in the United States. Guided by a conceptual framework that integrates multiple levels and domains of influence, our overall

objective is to engage the UTRGV HP community in a structured, comprehensive research needs assessment and develop a corresponding action plan characterized by clear, feasible, measurable, sustainable, and institutionally championed action items that support high-quality, cutting-edge biomedical research.

To achieve our objective, our multidisciplinary team will conduct an environmental scan, analyze research- related policies and procedures, assess faculty research capacity and needs, examine the institutional research support infrastructure, and explore student research support and opportunities. This will allow us to:

Aim 1. Identify the structural, systemic, social, and psychological factors impacting biomedical research productivity of HP faculty. Aim 2. Identify the critical interactions between factors, domains and levels of influence enabling and hindering research productivity. Aim 3. Develop an action plan to strengthen biomedical research capacity of HP faculty, with a focus on health

disparities research in the context of Hispanic/Latino culture. Our work will add a much-needed perspective, without which the potential of health research to better understand, deal more effectively with, and eliminate health disparities in underserved populations will not be realized. The proposed assessment and action plan promise to build a multidisciplinary, interprofessional

biomedical research capacity that will uniquely position UTRGV to advance health research, support the pipeline of the future biomedical research workforce, and serve as a research capacity building model for minority-serving, resource-limited institutions.