September 20, 2004

Contact: Christine Decker, 503 494-8231; deckerch@ohsu.edu

$1.75 MILLION GRANT AIMS TO HELP LATINAS BATTERED BY THEIR PARTNERS

PORTLAND, Ore. - There may soon be more help for Latina women who are victims of intimate partner violence. A $1.75 million, four-year grant has been given to the Oregon Health & Science University Center for Health Disparities Research to develop improved interventions to reduce the health disparities among Latinas who are battered by their partners.

"Latina Americans have disproportionately higher rates of poverty, stresses related to acculturation and discrimination, and higher vulnerability to intimate partner violence than European American women," said Nancy Glass Ph.D., M.P.H., R.N., assistant professor, OHSU School of Nursing. Glass is principal investigator of the study and co-director of the new disparities center with Corliss McKeever, M.S.W., president and chief executive officer of the African American Health Coalition Inc. and assistant professor, OHSU School of Nursing.

The major factors contributing to the continued related health disparities in abused Latinas include: first, most intimate partner violence intervention studies have focused on European American women rather than on women of color; second, intervention services are often connected to the use of formal health and social services, such as domestic violence shelters, health care and law enforcement agencies. These formal systems may not be meeting the needs of women of color.

"Latinas are known to underuse these services because they lack health insurance, or because of language and cultural barriers and distrust of formal systems. Thus, Latinas require intervention services in nontraditional arenas," Glass said.

An innovative approach in this study to reducing these health disparities is to develop and evaluate the interventions in service organizations where U.S.-born Latina women are frequently employed, such as food service and custodial, home care and childcare agencies.

The study is funded by the National Institutes of Health/National Institute for Nursing Research. The study is in collaboration with Portland State University, University of Oregon, Multnomah County Domestic Violence Coordinator's Office, SMG Foundation, Volunteers of American Home-Free Domestic Violence Program, and several business organizations and unions throughout the state.

The Center for Health Disparities Research at OHSU School of Nursing was created in December 2003 to wipe out the huge differences in overall health between the rich and the poor, between whites and racial and ethnic minorities, and also between urban and rural people. The center has developed innovative collaborations with community-based agencies, foundations, academic institutions, local and state public health agencies, and health care systems with the mission of developing culturally competent community-academic research collaborations to eliminate health disparities.