Advancing Oral Health Equity Through Increased Awareness of Healthcare Provider Stigma Among Dental Professional Learners Through Interprofessional Collaboration and Community & Patient Engagement

Healthcare provider stigma is a systemic barrier to equitable care and widens healthcare disparities. 20-50% of persons living with HIV do not access the oral health services they need. Research shows healthcare professionals who hold stigmatizing attitudes towards PLWHA commonly manifest it in clinical encounters. Interprofessional collaborative, community, and patient engagement educational interventions help shape the attitudes and behaviors of the future oral healthcare professional workforce. Reduction in healthcare provider stigma begins in dental education through increasing awareness of it and its impact on oral health outcomes. This seminar will demonstrate the positive impact of stigma awareness intervention. It will begin with background information, defining healthcare provider stigma, it’s impact on clinical care and outcomes, and why provider stigma awareness and reduction training and interventions are necessary to improve patient care, experience, and outcomes. Next, learners will be given a rubric to help them identify stigma barriers of care that may exist for their patient population and to identify people in their area to create interprofessional collaboration and community engagement to help increase awareness of HCPS. Learners will review tools to help healthcare providers identify and reflect on their potential stigma attitudes and to create opportunities to recognize that what they know intellectually and scientifically may not be congruent with what they feel emotionally, showing up negatively in patient care encounters. Finally, the interprofessional and community collaborative intervention developed and implemented will be discussed followed by evidence of its effectiveness.
The summit theme will be addressed by demonstrating how interventions can be interprofessionally and collaboratively designed to increase awareness of stigma barriers to care in order to advance health for all. After attending, learners will be able to identify potential attitudinal care barriers existing in their setting, potential interprofessional and community collaborators including existing clients, patients, and customers that could help increase awareness of the attitudinal barriers that may exist among their health care providers, and innovative ways to encourage behavior change among care providers through interprofessional and community collaborative efforts. The participants will leave with strategies and actionable rubrics to help identify barriers to care for their patient population and how to identify the best interprofessional and community collaborators. Using MindMeister, a virtual mind mapping collaborative tool, participants will engage as they identify attitudinal care barriers in their own communities, potential interprofessional & community collaborators and corresponding interventions to achieve awareness of and reduction in care barriers. This seminar fulfills the priority criteria. It includes interprofessional collaboration, community engagement through participation of patient advocates and patients as teachers for health care provider students. The attendees will experience meaningful engagement as they learn translational strategies and apply the information and intervention steps to their respective areas and organization. Measurable learning outcomes will be presented as analyzed data using the Wilcoxon test, effect size, and paired sample t-tests demonstrating the effectiveness of innovative strategies that are scalable. This addresses the Quadruple aim of enhancing patient experience, improving population health, increasing value, and improving the emotional wellness of the health care team.