Assistant Professor of Occupational Therapy Heather Fritz has been awarded $461,894 from the National Institute of Health, Institute on Aging (1R15AG063087-01A1) to better understand the chronic condition self-management challenges that lie at the intersection of age and race.

Older African Americans have higher rates of chronic health conditions and face substantive challenges with chronic condition self-management. Those challenges, however, are often poorly understood by predominantly young, affluent, European American physicians. The difference in experience and perspective between older African Americans and providers can result in misunderstandings, lack of empathy, and lower-quality care.

The project, titled, "DO TELL - Digitized Stories to Bridge the Gap Between Patient and Provider Perceptions of Disease Self-Management Challenges," involves collecting older African Americans' stories of chronic condition self-management challenges, extracting the most important messages of those stories, and developing brief videos communicating those messages. The videos will then be piloted among a sample of medical students to examine their ability to understand the messages and factors that might explain misunderstanding in particular.

The resulting digitized videos will be cataloged for use by other researchers and to use as teaching tools. In addition to Fritz (PI), the study team includes co-investigators Wayne State Professor of Occupational Therapy Malcolm Cutchin, Professor of Emergency Medicine Phillip Levy, and Professor of English Richard Marback.

The Wayne State University Master of Occupational Therapy program is housed in the Eugene Applebaum College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences.