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5 minutes with Kelsey Grabeel

By Penny Schnarrs posted 02-16-2022 12:00:00 AM

  

@Kelsey GrabeelAssistant Director at the Health Information Center and Preston Medical Library and Assistant Professor at the University of Tennessee College of Medicine (Knoxville campus)This spotlight with Kelsey originally appeared in the AAMC CHARGE Community in April 2020.

If you’d like to be featured in a future Member Spotlight, reach out to @Penny Schnarrs here via the community direct messaging feature.

Kelsey Grabeel

What sparked your interest in health equity or health disparities work?

As a medical librarian, I've always had a passion for helping our community find reliable and accurate health information. So many people turn to Google for health information, and often receive incorrect or misleading information. However, with the resources we have in our library, our Health Information Center provides to our patients and community members health, wellness and medical information from reliable sources. When our medical library moved from its former location on the medical center's and Graduate School of Medicine's campus and into the main hospital to become the Health Information Center – thus enabling us with a greater ability to help our community – we also wanted to make sure our staff and healthcare providers understood how we could be a resource to them as well. Therefore, we hosted a Health Literacy Forum in 2015, which was attended by healthcare providers from across the Southeast. From there, our work just grew as more and more people began to understand the resources we could provide to them.


What health-equity related project are you most proud of and/or excited about?

I am most proud of our assessment of our medical center. We used The Health Literacy Environment of Hospitals and Health Centers (Rudd & Anderson 2006) to assess our medical center in 5 different areas: navigation, print communication, oral communication, technology, and policies & protocols. I'm very proud of it because we had support from the CEO and Leadership Team of our medical center. It was also a lot of work! But we had great results and some projects have emerged from it.

I'm excited to start our library's next project working with our local Free Medical Clinic and one of the local community centers. We are looking forward to working with them. 


Do you have any health equity "heroes"? If so, who are they?

I would say Rima Rudd for sure. I've worked with her some and she continues to amaze me. She's done so much good work and continues to! I'm amazed.


Imagine you're a PI on your dream research project: What's the question you're trying to answer?

That's a really great question. I'd love to know more about our community and patient population. I'd probably want to do some kind of assessment in regard to health literacy levels. I'd love to try to get a more accurate understanding of our patient population.


What health equity or social justice issue do you think deserves more attention than it gets right now?

I think education is really important and from an early age. Research has shown that early care and education can help narrow the gap. Also, it is important to have more health education for adults. There's so much to know when it comes to healthcare, from hospital payments to taking care of a chronic health condition. From our health information service, I've also learned that a lot of people turn to Google to find their health information and I think there should be more education on using more reliable and accurate sources. At our library, we try to do that, and we also have our Health Information Center's services to assist in that endeavor.


Do you have an immediate research collaboration need?

I'm always looking for people to collaborate with!


What do you like to do for fun outside of work?

Living up to the stereotype of a librarian, I love to read. I also like to spend as much time outside as I can.

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Say “hello” to Kelsey here in the community! Feel free to post any questions you have for her in this thread, or direct messages via the community as also a great way to connect.

 

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