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Looking To Reduce Health Disparities In Rochester

An ongoing effort to raise awareness about racism in the Rochester community is focusing on health disparities.

Area medical professionals and advocates talked about the issue during an event held at the Riverside Convention Center downtown on Friday as part of the annual Stand Against Racism effort organized by the YWCA.

Speakers including Dr. Telva Olivares, a psychiatrist at the University of Rochester Medical Center, noted that part of the effort to deal with health disparities in this community should involve increased efforts to recruit more people of color in health care jobs.

“There’s a mistrust in the community (about) our health care system, and I think if the health care system starts looking like the people we treat, I think we can start to break down some of those barriers.”

Dr. Janice Hardin is CEO for the Jordan Health Center, and she notes that the Rochester area also needs to reach out to refugee population which has been increasing.

“One of our centers, Brown Square, the majority of the patients seen, multiple languages (are) spoken;  how do we engage, actually helping people to engage their health care? ”

Both Olivares and Harbin say this region, like many others, is also dealing with structural racism, which has resulted in an uneven distribution of health care to various populations.

“The Spanish community in Rochester, probably 50,000 people and I’m one of two Spanish-speaking psychiatrists in the community, which shows the great disparity between the lack of resources in our community for racially sensitive providers,” Olivares told WXXI News.

Harbin said in general, there needs to be greater outreach in communities that are not getting proper medical care.

“I think a lot of times we get wonderful research and wonderful data, wonderful best practices, but we really need to engage actively on an ongoing basis the people that we serve, or we’re attempting to help  solve some of these problems and issues," Harbin said.

Randy Gorbman is WXXI's director of news and public affairs. Randy manages the day-to-day operations of WXXI News on radio, television, and online.