The U.S. spends twice as much as any other country in the world on health care and yet our population health indicators lag painfully behind other countries. Health care disparities are considered one of the likely major contributing causes. With the recent implementation of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA), collaboration across multiple services is becoming a necessity. Our Focal Point award will allow for collaborative discussion as well as action regarding challenges that face underserved populations in local and global communities. We plan to create an interactive discussion forum of important health care issues between a multidisciplinary group of graduate students within the schools of medicine, nursing, public health, nutrition, health research, social work, biotechnology, kinesiology and related disciplines. In order to ensure that our discussion is relevant and current to issues that concern the local and global community, we will invite local and global community organizations to facilitate interactive discussions between these student groups. We see the need not only to unite graduate educational programs on campus that have similar goals regarding health care issues and practice, but also to inform the academic discussion with real-life challenges from community leaders in health care practice. The goal of this multidisciplinary forum will be to discuss issues pertinent to local and global health and to then to test our newly formed collective knowledge and teamwork skills by working together on health care outreach projects in the community. In addition, we will establish an international collaboration around these issues by inviting students from the Autonomous University of San Luis Potosi, Mexico (UASLP) to join in our interactive discussion sessions. We will also host a culminating conference event in April 2015 to reflect on our interactive discussion forums, outreach activities as well as global collaboration with UASLP.
