Publications by authors named "Nancy Esparza"

Background: Community-academic partnerships are increasingly used in interventions to address health care disparities. Little is known about motivations and perceptions of participating community members.

Objectives: To elicit community members' perspectives of involvement in a community-academic partnership to address implicit bias in health care.

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The pandemic context presents remarkable psychological challenges for adolescents and young adults. The aim of the present work was to construct and study the psychometric properties of a scale in Spanish language (W-COV) to measure their worries related to the pandemic. Participants were 5559 people aged between 14 and 25 years old (M = 19.

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Background: Healthcare professionals have negative implicit biases toward minority and poor patients. Few communication skills interventions target implicit bias as a factor contributing to disparities in health outcomes. We report the protocol from the COmmuNity-engaged SimULation Training for Blood Pressure Control (CONSULT-BP), a trial evaluating a novel educational and training intervention targeting graduate medical and nursing trainees that is designed to mitigate the effects of implicit bias in clinical encounters.

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Purpose: We wanted to evaluate novel decision aids designed to help patients trust and accept the controversial, evidence-based, US Preventive Services Task Force recommendations about prostate cancer screening (from 2012) and mammography screening for women aged 40 to 49 years (from 2009).

Methods: We created recorded vignettes of physician-patient discussions about prostate cancer screening and mammography, accompanied by illustrative slides, based on principles derived from preceding qualitative work and behavioral science literature. We conducted a randomized crossover study with repeated measures with 27 men aged 50 to 74 years and 35 women aged 40 to 49 years.

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In this article, we present the results of a local needs assessment of the mental health experiences, service needs, and barriers to treatment-seeking of the Latino population in Worcester, Massachusetts. Overall, participants reported relatively high rates of experiences with symptoms of mental health problems, they indicated using a range of both formal and alternative mental health services, and they noted a variety of instrumental, attitudinal, and culturally-specific barriers to seeking mental health services. Findings are discussed with regards to the role that community-driven research can play in advancing efforts to provide relevant services to underserved populations.

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