Chapter 19: Creating the SECURE Project

Chapter 19: Creating the SECURE Project

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Description

Dr. Jones talks about the SECURE project begun in 2010 to address community needs for healthcare support in regional emergency situations. He explains that it grew out needs that became evident in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Dr. Jones invited many institutions to participate, including Meharry Medical College. He offers some context, explaining how the Flexner Report reduced the number of African-American medical schools, and Meharry was able to survive the closures. He explains why it was important that Meharry be represented in the SECURE project. He explains the projects developed, including the Texas Partnership for Addressing Health Disparities, and notes that now that he is retired, the SECURE consortium will be housed at Texas A & M University, Corpus Christi.

Identifier

JonesLA_04_20140501_C19

Publication Date

5-1-2014

Publisher

The Making Cancer History® Voices Oral History Collection, The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center

City

Houston, Texas

Topics Covered

The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center - Beyond the Institution; The Administrator; The Educator; Women and Diverse Populations; The History of Health Care, Patient Care

Transcript

Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:

Yeah. Hmm. Would you like to talk next about the SECURE project?

Lovell A. Jones, PhD:

Yeah. The SECURE project actually came out of the consortium-

Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:

Oh, interesting.

Lovell A. Jones, PhD:

-in that it was the first NIH grant. We got funds from the Houston endowment. In fact, they funded us longer than they funded any other program. They funded us, I think, five, six years.

Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:

How did it come out of the consortium, by the way?

Lovell A. Jones, PhD:

Because one of the goals of the consortium, remember one of the arms is research, and the ERA [phonetic] money that Congress put up to stimulate research, we came together and we met on an annual basis personally, and then quarterly by phone conference. But we met here in Houston at one of the workshops. No, actually, it was during National Minority Cancer Awareness Week. And we asked the representatives at that meeting-we had seen the announcement of the Call for Applications, and we saw the four areas that they had announced in terms of health disparities, and one was disaster preparedness. Another was health disparities in [unclear]. And we debated on what would be most advantageous to not only the researchers that were in the room, but the community at large. And we had just gone through a major hurricane, and we said, "Disaster preparedness." And so of the member institutions, seven said they would participate in writing this grant to create a disaster preparedness program. It included the University of Miami, Tulane University, University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston, Baylor, MD Anderson, Meharry Medical College.

Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:

I'm sorry. What's the name of that one?

Lovell A. Jones, PhD:

Meharry.

Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:

I don't know that one.

Lovell A. Jones, PhD:

That's in Nashville.

Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:

Oh, okay.

Lovell A. Jones, PhD:

It's one of the surviving black medical schools. If you don't know the history of that, is that at the turn of the century there were ten black medical schools in the country. There were eighteen women medical schools in the country. None of the women medical schools survived the Flexner Report, and the Flexner Report was done by two brothers, one a physician, the other a hatchet man. (laughs) And it was a way of the Medical Society to control the number of physicians in the U.S. and who would be a physician. So they went around the country-quote, unquote-looking at the quality of the training of physicians, and then they came back with the recommendation that no medical school should exist that's not affiliated with a university. Well, most of the women medical schools weren't, because [unclear]. And only one of the medical schools was-well, actually only one was affiliated, of the ten, with a university, and that was Howard University's medical school. And Meharry happened to be quasi affiliated with Fisk, which is across the street. So those were the only two that survived.

Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:

Wow.

Lovell A. Jones, PhD:

So if you look at that-and I tell people to think about this in terms of health disparities, because people haven't made that link, at least as far as I know. So you go from ten to two. The majority of institutions are not taking African Americans as medical students, so you've now reduced the flow of physicians by 80 percent to a community that really needs physicians. And then you redirect women to be nurses, because the majority of medical schools aren't going to take women either.

Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:

Or maybe not even nurses.

Lovell A. Jones, PhD:

Right. So you set the pattern for years and years and decades, because by 1918, there were no women medical schools in the country, and there were just Meharry and Howard.

Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:

How do you spell Meharry?

Lovell A. Jones, PhD:

M-e-h-a-r-r-y.

Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:

Okay. Great. Thanks.

Lovell A. Jones, PhD:

So that's a sidebar. But anyway, Meharry was-and the reason why we brought Meharry in, they were very interested in doing this. Several reasons. One, they were predominantly an African American medical school whose focus was on addressing the underserved. And secondly, Nashville was probably the second or third largest site of individuals who left because of [Hurricane] Katrina. So they were impacted by these individuals who were impacted by a storm. So we came together to form, under this grant, the SECURE consortium, to really develop programs, and actually we helped to develop a computer application that we're still trying to get people interested in, that one of the features of it is that you could go into the program and you could list people that you trust, and so if you were separated from your children and they were at a specific place that you could not go to, you could actually have the program send a text message to the phone, "My kids are here. I need for you to go and get them now."

Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:

Wow.

Lovell A. Jones, PhD:

It would hold all your medications, all your personal history, and so that you could access it anywhere in the world.

Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:

Wow.

Lovell A. Jones, PhD:

And we were embarking on trying to get it as a mobile app, and, in fact, the company's still working on it, because we have a company that became part of the consortium to work with us, to help us first in terms of developing the webpage, but also to get together with us as an advisory group to help them develop this app and so that we could give them information on what was needed from the community's perspective, as opposed to just the developer's perspective. The consortium is quasi alive, quasi in that the HDEART consortium is still active.

Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:

What is that, the HDEART?

Lovell A. Jones, PhD:

HDEART, Health Disparities Education, Awareness, Research and Training Consortium. That's what we refer to as HDEART, with the D silent. Some people say, "D HEART," and I say [unclear]. (laughs) It's being revamped in that now that I'm on the faculty at Texas A&M-Corpus Christi, they have agreed to be its academic home for the HDEART consortium. So we're rebuilding the webpage for not only HDEART consortium, which will be part of the Intercultural Cancer Council's webpage-in fact, we just had it revamped yesterday by a webmaster down there, so we are getting ready to go live again with the information about the consortium but also about the workshop, because we used to be here on Anderson's webpage, and then that got taken down.

Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:

What are some other projects that SECURE worked on?

Lovell A. Jones, PhD:

That was primarily it. Its focus was on-well, we worked on mental health, the issue. The institutions had their own special focus. The unifying effort was it had to have something to do with addressing disaster preparedness. So University of Miami took on the issue of mental health, what happens to patients, especially who are under treatment, what happens to children who are, in terms of their mental health, impacted by displacement, that sort of thing, so anything that created a stress that could have some bearing on an individual's health status, they began to look at. And I think what has happened, what's come out of that is that there are many grants that they have, themselves, used the data generated from SECURE to go after, in terms of the National Institute of Mental Health. I know that there are a couple grants that they've written that they've gotten funded to spin off to do that sort of thing. For Tulane, it was looking at Vietnamese and what happened with that population, in a global sense, in the health areas. For Houston, it was developing educational programs in elementary and middle school to train students what to do when disasters came and develop disaster kits that they would keep in their homes, and that we know that it's now part of a number of the schools that were in their curriculum, so they've maintained that going forward. For UTNB [phonetic], it was developing and working with TPAHD, which is the other program that we did for the state.

Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:

TPAHD?

Lovell A. Jones, PhD:

TPAHD, Texas Partnership for Addressing Health Disparities. It's kind of a mini version of the HDEART consortium, [unclear] only involved the HDEART institutions in Texas. So part of the program was to develop a Health Disparities Index, and so we worked with the State Health Department to develop this index that we're still waiting for the state. The state is holding it and to field-test it, so we're waiting for their decision in terms of how they're going to implement. But that was part of the program for Galveston, and to look at disasters in terms of what happened in with [Hurricane] Ike in Galveston and how could they do it, how could they address it in a better way going forward. So those sort of programs all under the-and I know that the program in Galveston is still going because the Health Disparities Center down there has put more money into it, and I know that Galveston, the university, has put money into it because they saw what the benefits of it were going forward. So even though SECURE as a unit is not going forward, the projects that it birthed are still going forward, and we still get information because the individuals who are till doing it, most of them are representatives of those institutions to HDEART. So when we get together, they give us a report about what's happening. So it's probably going to be more formal now, now that we're back and have an academic home. And I've been talking to Curt Calhoun [phonetic], who is the current chair of HDEART, and the president of A&M-Corpus Christi about getting together and formalizing the leadership group that we had going about three years there.

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Chapter 19: Creating the SECURE Project

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