“This is a guest post of Caitlin Winston, Public Policy student of University of Virginia who finished a 6 weeks internship at the research centre 360° Care and Well-being at HOGENT”
As an American student, I had little knowledge of the topic of diversity in healthcare before coming to work on DISCOPMB. Through my work on the project, I have learned about the importance of visibility, education, and policy for healthcare for older migrants living in Europe. Working in Belgium on this project has opened my mind to possibilities for solutions to policy challenges in both the United States and Europe. I have found these education materials and training to be a particularly useful tool. Diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) trainings are used in America but I feel that the specificity of the target group and the different data and resources it contains, help make the trainings more useful in practice.
As an intern for the HOGENT 360° Care and Well-being Research Centre, one of the DISCOPMB partners, I mostly worked on the training materials. The project is related to educating healthcare workers and students on how to best provide care for older migrants in a diversity-sensitive manner. The previous months, the original training materials were tested across multiple partner institutions, providing useful feedback as to differences between the best training materials for students and the best training materials for professionals. As an intern, I analyzed feedback from multiple venues—reflections from the students themselves, data from surveys, and observations from the partners and educators.
Through this analysis we learned a great deal about what worked and what did not in our original training package. Overall, the data from surveys showed that students and professionals alike learned a great deal from the original training materials and enjoyed them as well. That said, we appreciated the partners and students’ willingness to give constructive feedback to make our training package even more effective. In fact, much of the original material was considered effective and helpful. With a bit of reorganizing, additional activities, and more content for difficult theoretical models, we believe that the DISCOPMB training materials will be even more effective than before. We look forward to sharing these results and materials in the fall.
As a public policy student, I am returning to the United States with a new appreciation for the importance of diversity-sensitive care and healthcare policy. I also have grown my appreciation for cross-cultural work and the ways diverse voices and perspectives can improve research and policy. Inter-European collaboration create opportunities for more perspectives and exchange of ideas. Issues like care for older migrants are not isolated in one country, and the more collaboration and research that is happening, the faster solutions will be found. I hope to see the United States get involved in this important work, and I believe there is great potential for this topic globally.
Cover picture: Karolina Kaboompics