PRIME: A state health department effort to build organizational capacity to reduce health disparities

There is great interest within public health agencies to work towards achieving health equity, but few have identified pragmatic strategies to guide the day-to-day activities of health department staff. Efforts to promote health equity have primarily focused on increasing the capacity of staff to understand and recognize racism but previous programs have not equipped staff to address racial disparities through their specific professional roles and responsibilities. In this presentation, we will describe Practices to Reduce Infant Mortality through Equity (PRIME), a project of the Michigan Department of Community Health's Bureau of Family, Maternal & Child Health to reduce racial disparities in infant mortality between Blacks and Whites and between Native Americans and Whites in Michigan. In contrast to existing models, the PRIME intervention is based on three premises: (1) education and training to address racial health disparities should help staff improve their confidence and performance in areas that are directly relevant to their day-to-day job roles and tasks; (2) staff should be able to see how training efforts are connected to the departmental role, mission and vision; and (3) the training needs of staff who interact directly with community members and community-health services is different than those who do not. We will describe the key components of the PRIME intervention, including our efforts to organize a Local Learning Collaborative, create unique approaches to addressing Black-White and Native American-White disparities, and train staff to apply, not just define, a health equity lens to their efforts to address health disparities.