BWHET Trainings
Integrated Health Workforce Development Collaborative
The Integrated Health Workforce Development Collaborative promotes well-defined and continuous activities designed to encourage underrepresented minority students and students of low socioeconomic status to pursue health professions careers, place students in RUMUAs upon graduation, and provide supports to retain health professionals in practice in RUMUAs.
The collaborative’s plan identifies workforce training and technical assistance needs and promotes recruitment and retention activities.
This plan is designed to:
- Support the state’s goal of preparing and sustaining a culturally competent health care workforce that is prepared to deliver high-quality care in a transforming health delivery system with an emphasis on RUMUAs.
- Promote the core competencies of a patient-centered medical home: inter-professional training with integrated behavioral health care, social determinants of health, cultural competency, practice transformation, and current and emerging health issues.
Integrated Health Curriculum
Our curriculum establishes field placements that reinforce knowledge and skills in integrated behavior health that promote culturally competent care and health equity through didactic and experiential learning by focusing on the following learning objectives within the context of rural health:
1) Increase understanding of attitudes, such as mistrust, subconscious bias, and stereotyping, which practitioners and patients may bring to clinical encounters in rural communities.
2) Gain knowledge of the existence and magnitude of health disparities in rural communities, including the multifactorial causes of health disparities and the many solutions required to reduce or eliminate them.
3) Acquire the skills to effectively communicate and negotiate across the layers of different
cultures, local languages, and literacy levels, including the use of key tools to improve
communication between the provider and the patient.
4) develop effective communication skills for talking with different audiences, including patients, providers, and policymakers in rural communities.
Our curriculum includes community-based, experiential, and clinical activities, which
include interdisciplinary, team-based, behavioral health training and didactic education in rural and/or medically underserved settings. This longitudinal training experience is designed to increase the knowledge and exposure of residents to RUMUAs during their training where they will be introduced to cross-cutting health disparities issues, evidence-based clinical and preventive guidelines and interventions, health disparities research, cultural competency,patient-centered medical home, and systems thinking.
Integrated Health Field Rotations
Crosscutting Thematic Domains and Field Placements: Behavioral health integration
into primary care includes innovative models that deliver behavioral and primary care
services in rural communities through field placements. We collaborate with and model current models that exist in Tennessee as demonstrated by the Area Health Education Center (AHEC) located at Meharry and its partner, Cherokee Health Services (CHS) headquarters in Knox County.