African-American men have long distrusted the health care system, and it shows in how slow they are to go to the doctor. A new grant to a team of Nashville researchers will establish a way to measure that trust and whether it’s improving.
The $250,000 in funding comes from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. And Consuelo Wilkins, who directs a joint venture between the Vanderbilt and Meharry medical schools, is overseeing the two-year project.
“If we want to improve trust, we actually need to be able to measure it and see what kinds of strategies we are implementing that work and how well they work,” she says.
Measuring trust has been difficult for researchers in the field, so Wilkins’ team will establish focus groups and use surveys to set a baseline and then a process for gauging trust going forward.
Much of the skepticism among black men is
deep-seated. But some of it is subtle.
“African-American men’s trust may be influenced by past abuses like the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, previous bad experiences with a health care system, a perceived lack of respect by medical professionals or other concerns specific to this population,” said Derek Griffith, director of the Center for Research on Men’s Health at Vanderbilt.
Wilkins recalls addressing a group of retired police. An elderly gentleman said that when he’s on the street, he’s still called officer. At church, he’s called deacon. And when he goes to the hospital, he’s called by his first name.
“‘They don’t get to know me, and they don’t try and understand some of the challenges that I face or how hard it was to actually walk through these doors,'” she recalls him saying. “That’s one of those times where, wow, I didn’t really think about that.”
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