By Ryan Otteson | Reporter
The Rural Health Equity Research Collaborative is a research lab led by undergraduate students to help alleviate healthcare shortages in medically underserved communities. The group of students in the lab work with communities to introduce healthcare careers to middle school aged children.
Lansing, Mich. junior Rachael Barry is the principal investigator of the lab and oversees the projects of the group, as well as their leadership team and researchers.
There are two different branches of RHERC. One of them is Realistic Healthcare Experiences and the other is Academic Achievement. RHE is a four session intervention and each session is 45 minutes.
“We introduce them to four different healthcare topics. So we introduce them to surgery, nursing, dentistry and then EMS, paramedic, first aid kind of stuff,” Barry said.
Those are done in person or online and the group does surveys before and after each intervention to see how the childrens’ attitudes towards these healthcare careers changes. While the students are not able to share data at this time, what they have observed so far is that introducing the kids to these careers has worked.
When the fifth through eighth grade students answered questions about if they knew people in healthcare or if they would be interested in working in healthcare, more had answered “yes” after the interventions than before.
The next branch of RHERC focuses on helping the students get to a place where achieving that career is possible. They host tutoring sessions for Algebra I to help students take first steps towards a bright future and career.
“We’re trying to improve their standardized test scores so that they can then pursue a career in healthcare,” Barry said.
Dallas senior Ana Alvarez is a teacher’s assistant for the academic achievement branch.
“A lot of times they are really behind, and we weren’t anticipating that at all,” she said. “And so we had to backtrack our math skills to something that is more like an eighth grade level or even something that is more of a seventh grade level just because how behind they were.”
To study the results for this branch, researchers look at standardized test results to see if there is improvement and also look at self efficacy to see how the students feel about the material.
Alvarez also has a twin, Dallas senior Edith Alvarez, who is the logistics director for RHERC and works in the RHE branch. She too is very passionate about helping these communities and hopes to run a clinic one day with her sister.
“Our goal is to inspire them to potentially seek higher education, and specifically in the medical field because we see in research studies that oftentimes people or students in these communities that go off to med-school or PA school will often come back and serve their communities,” Edith Alvarez said.
