For immediate release

Improving Hispanic health care
is focus of higher education panel

SAN ANTONIO, Texas –A new national group of higher education professionals representing the Hispanic Association of Colleges and Universities (HACU) will focus on efforts to improve health care for America’s fast-growing Hispanic population.

The team of 20 professors, instructors, administrators and minority health care grant specialists represent HACU member colleges and universities at the forefront of Hispanic health care education and outreach in California, Illinois, New Mexico, Puerto Rico and Texas.

They were selected to participate in a program sponsored by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) and HACU called the DHHS-HACU Professions Capacity Building Program. Now in its sixth year, the program is funded by the DHHS National Center on Minority and Health Disparities and administered by the DHHS Office of Minority Health. HACU manages the program through HACU’s Office of Education Collaboratives.

“This year’s program participants represent an extraordinary array of expertise on issues of importance to the urgent health care needs of our country’s under-insured, disproportionately impoverished Hispanic communities. Their collective efforts ultimately will lead to providing more disease prevention outreach, health education and other health care services to the country’s youngest and largest ethnic population,” said HACU President and CEO Antonio R. Flores.

“HACU applauds the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, and its Office of Minority Health and National Center on Minority and Health Disparities, for this proactive initiative to promote a healthier future for the nation’s diverse community,” Flores said.

The training and professional development program is designed to strengthen the capacity of the country’s historically under-funded Hispanic-Serving Institutions, or HSIs, to secure and manage more federal grants and other funding opportunities for biomedical and health services research targeting minority health care needs.

HSIs, which serve the largest concentrations of Hispanic higher education students in the largest U.S. Hispanic population centers, currently receive only about half the federal funding per student on average compared to all other degree-granting institutions.

“The DHHS-HACU Professions Capacity Building Program is providing our HSIs the tools to secure more federal grants to address the health care needs of Hispanic communities through education, research and outreach,” said René A. González, HACU Director of Education Collaboratives. He is the program’s co-principal investigator with Raymond Garza, a professor and executive director of the Culture and Policy Institute at the University of Texas at San Antonio, a HACU member HSI, serving as Principal Investigator.

HACU, the only nationally recognized voice for HSIs, represents 370 colleges and universities that collectively serve more than two-thirds of all U.S. Hispanic higher education students, as well as a growing international membership of leading higher education institutions throughout the Americas and in Spain.

Program participants will complete a series of professional development activities that include online courses and hands-on workshops. An initial training workshop was held in San Antonio, Texas, in June, with a week-long training session scheduled for July in Bethesda, Maryland. As part of this summer’s program, the National Institutes of Health will introduce participants to potential NIH funding opportunities for HSIs during the Bethesda meeting.