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NCEMNA scholar Joy Solomon-Duarte (left) plans career strategies with mentor Lorna Harris.

Wheezing and gasping, Domingo Solomon thought he had just enough medication to last through another asthma attack. He pursed his lips around his inhaler and pushed. Its hollow sound whooshed “empty.” No insurance, no money for medication. He made it to the ED, but it was too late.

Joy Solomon-Duarte, RN, carries her brother’s story in her heart. “It’s my motivation for a nursing research and teaching career that will help dispel health care disparities,” she says. Though Domingo died in the Philippines, disparities are a fact of life in the U.S., where rates of disease and death are different among population groups. Disparities related to race, ethnicity, and socioeconomic status are pervasive, according to the federal Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality’s 2004 National Healthcare Disparities Report.

“We’ve made very little progress in alleviating disparities related to lifestyles and cultural lifestyle issues,” says Betty Smith Williams, RN, DrPH, FAAN, president of the National Coalition of Ethnic Minority Nurse Associations (NCEMNA). Williams, professor emerita at California State University, Long Beach, says there’s limited information about why these disparities exist. She believes that nursing research will find much-needed answers to help close the gap.

NCEMNA, made up of five national ethnic minority nurses associations (see sidebar), gives voice to more than 350,000 nurses and to the health experience of a constituency often marginalized by mainstream health care delivery. Armed with grant money from the National Institutes of Health/National Institute of General Medical Sciences, NCEMNA aims to increase the number of nurse scientists to reflect the nation’s diversity. Under Williams’ leadership and with the support of Nursing Spectrum since the group’s 1998 inception, NCEMNA held its first national conference in March 2005 to set in motion its new program, Creating Research Careers in Nursing (created with grant money from the NCEMNA: Nurse Scientist Stimulation Program).

Says Nursing Spectrum President and Publisher Patti Rager, RN, MSN, MBA, who serves as an advisory board member, “We are delighted to serve as a sponsor of NCEMNA because Nursing Spectrum shares NCEMNA’s mission to promote diversity in nursing and to educate nurses so they can better serve their communities. We applaud NCEMNA’s groundbreaking collaborative solutions to develop nurse scientists who will address and correct health care disparities.”

Creating Research Careers in Nursing will fashion and support a network of ethnic minority nurse researchers to investigate the causes, prevention, and treatment of health problems that disproportionately affect minorities.

“The needs of minority populations must be addressed within the context of a culturally competent model of care,” says Williams. “Who better to conduct research on disparities than members of the groups?”

As part of the program, accomplished minority nurse researchers have volunteered to mentor 50 scholars throughout the year. Lorna Harris, RN, PhD, FAAN, NCEMNA project director and professor, shares 25 years of research experience and tells nurses that “research gives a richness to nursing and makes it exciting.” When some nurses hear the word research,they think it’s unrelated to what they’re doing, says Harris. “Research is something nurses do every day. It’s just problem solving — a matter of organizing thoughts and asking questions to which you can get clear responses.”

Harris views health disparities largely as a health care access issue. The care is out there, but client needs haven’t been matched with what the system has to offer. Research means finding out where a mismatch occurred and how to fix it and providing different strategies in problem solving, says Harris.

“Because of their knowledge of the needs of the people in the community, ethnic minority nurses can help with that matching to make health care truly available,” she adds. For care that doesn’t exist, nurses can help develop ways to make it first available and then readily accessible.

Ethnic minority nurse researchers bring a unique perspective to the field because of firsthand knowledge of their culture.

“As minorities, we’ve traveled the road, encountered issues, and found strategies to deal with them,” says Antonia Villarruel, RN, PhD, FAAN, NCEMNA vice president and associate professor at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. “We’re not saying that we’re the only ones or the best ones to research disparities. Rather, we have special capabilities to do so,” she says. Given the small numbers of ethnic minority nurses, she adds,“we need more nurses to help us find evidence-based solutions to some of the major disparities.”

Nurse researchers face an added challenge: the limited amount of intervention research to tell them where they need to go, says Villarruel. Research is conducted with some minority groups but not others. Villarruel cites the lack of nursing research studies on lung cancer, the primary preventable cancer among all groups. “If this isn’t even in our awareness,” she says, “how is it going to guide our practice to move forward?”