Five projects submitted by faculty, staff, and trainee members of the University of Colorado Department of Medicine (DOM) have been awarded grants in the inaugural round of the department’s new Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Justice (DEIJ) grant program.
“This pilot program was designed to support projects that further DEIJ efforts among our local departmental community and have the potential to inspire change in academic medicine and patient care,” said the grant announcement from Sonia Flores, PhD, the DOM’s vice chair for Diversity and Justice; and Vineet Chopra, MD, MSc, the DOM’s chair.
In an interview, Flores said creation of the DEIJ grant program followed the formation two years ago of a DOM diversity council with representation from each division. “The idea was to design specific approaches and programs to infuse DEIJ across all of the divisions, so that our activities are harmonized and well-integrated,” she says.
A subcommittee of the Diversity Council developed the grant program’s guidelines and review criteria after many meetings. Originally, $10,000 was budgeted, and it was anticipated there would be one or two recipients, Flores says. “But we got so many outstanding applications that it was very hard to choose only two. I’m so happy that Dr. Chopra was able to come up with more money than was originally budgeted, and he agreed to up the budget for the first year to $21,500.”
Areas of focus for the grants include:
“We're looking for projects that can be sustainable and create an infrastructure that didn't exist before, not a one-off,” Flores says. It’s hoped that recipient projects will attract money from outside funding agencies, and that the DEIJ program will draw philanthropic donor funds for additional grants going forward.
Eleven “incredibly diverse” projects were submitted in the first round, she says. “They covered the gamut from making changes for trainees, faculty, and patients to the hospitals and the community. That was heartening. People put a lot of energy and creativity into their projects.”
Applications for the next round of grants will be accepted in fall 2024.
Among the projects to receive one of the initial rounds of grants was one submitted by Alfonso Roque, MS, clinical research coordinator for the DOM’s Division of Hematology; and Maria Amaya, MD, PhD, an assistant professor in the division.
Entitled “Improving Clinical Trial Awareness and Accrual of Underrepresented in Medicine Populations by Addressing Language Barriers,” the project’s stated goal is “to better educate patients and enhance feelings of support and trust through the creation of disease-specific videos in English and Spanish that provide an overview of hematologic diseases and relevant clinical trial processes.”
“Our project was built off the idea that low-English-proficient patients are not well represented in clinical trials – nationwide, about 12% in vaccine trials and as low as 3% in cancer trials,” Roque explains in an interview. “This makes clinical trials and research difficult to extrapolate for these populations, so we want to find a way to establish a level of understanding and build trust in these communities to allow them to feel like they can participate in trials overall.”
The project’s initial focus is creating bilingual videos on lymphoma, Roque says. “These videos will focus on helping a patient understand their specific disease, their prognosis, what their life would look like with different standards of care treatments, and then introduce them to clinical trials in general.”
Roque says the DEIJ grant was crucial to getting his and Amaya’s project off the ground. “This project wouldn’t have come to fruition without this seed funding. We now have the opportunity to greatly impact the communities I call home.”
If survey data demonstrates that community members are receptive to the project, Roque hopes to expand it to encompass multiple diseases and additional languages.
The other projects receiving grants in the DEIJ program’s first year are: