School of Medicine Publications and Presentations
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
12-2024
Abstract
El Paso Health Education and Awareness Team (EP-HEAT®) is a bilingual program focused on increasing health awareness and dispelling health-related misinformation in the U.S.-Mexico border region. EP-HEAT® consists of students, faculty, staff, and Promotoras. The primary objective of EP-HEAT® is to empower the community with healthcare resources in a culturally acceptable way. EP-HEAT® established the bilingual “In the Hot Seat with EP-HEAT®: Dispelling Myths in Healthcare” series commonly referred to as Myth Busters events. Community members were surveyed following the events. Our results showed the majority of EP-HEAT® event attendees identified as Hispanic and were older than 46 years of age. Following EP-HEAT® events, attendees felt comfortable teaching the information they learned to friends and family. Dispelling myths is instrumental for communities with limited access or knowledge of healthcare and diseases. EP-HEAT® events serve as a platform for evaluating the sources of community’s current health information, prevalence of healthcare myths, understanding the community’s health information needs, and disseminating accurate health information while dispelling myths in a culturally competent manner. Medical students need to become proficient in serving as educators, particularly in underserved areas. The skills developed by participating in EP-HEAT® myth-buster events provide information to the community while simultaneously providing opportunities for medical students to organize these events and allowing them to act as community-facing educators that may promote their professional identity development.
Recommended Citation
Mansour, S., Holland, N., Saucedo, S., Ramirez, A., Lane, M., Salisbury, J., ... & Chacon, J. (2024). Developing a Bilingual Health Education Program to Identify and Address Healthcare Misinformation in a Border Community. Journal of Primary Care & Community Health, 15, 21501319241311145. https://doi.org/10.1177/21501319241311145
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
Publication Title
Journal of Primary Care & Community Health
DOI
10.1177/21501319241311145
Academic Level
faculty
Mentor/PI Department
Medical Education
Comments
© The Author(s) 2024. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) which permits non-commercial use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access pages (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage).