Disability Prevention for Minority Elders

Through a grant funded by the National Institute on Aging (NIA) and the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), the Disparities Research Unit’s Minority Elders project brings together collaborators at Massachusetts General Hospital, New York University and Vanderbilt University, along with partner community-based organizations in Massachusetts and New York, to develop an intervention to reduce mental and physical disability among ethnic minority elders, and to build the research and programming capacity of the partner community-based organizations. The goals of the capacity-building framework of this study are to enhance the long-term feasibility and sustainability of disability-prevention programming, and more broadly, to address multiple barriers to using mental and physical health services by offering services in community locations already accessed by ethnic minority elders.

Our Objectives:

1) Develop collaborative partnerships to support research that can evaluate the capacity of community-based organizations to provide mental health and disability prevention services to minority elders as a model to reduce disparities.

2) Evaluate the acceptability and efficacy of a combined mental health and disability prevention intervention for minority elders being offered by community health workers and exercise trainers in community-based organizations.

3) Determine the organizational feasibility and sustainability of the combined mental health and disability prevention intervention, assessing issues such as feasibility, planned adoption, and potential barriers to long-term sustainability.

Funding Acknowledgement

This study is supported by Research Grant 7R01AG046149, funded by the National Institute on Aging (NIA) and the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH).