Office of Minority Health

The Office of the Assistant Secretary for Health (OASH), and the Office of Minority Health (OMH) announce the availability of funds for Fiscal Year (FY) 2022 under the authority of 42 U.S.C. § 300u-6 (Section 1707 of the Public Health Service Act). This notice solicits applications from public and non-profit private entities to be demonstration sites that identify and implement innovative strategies to enhance language access services through:

1. Policy development and implementation
2. Technology utilization
3. Education for individuals with LEP
4. Education for providers, including medical support staff

This initiative aligns with Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, E.O. 13166 Improving Access to Services for Persons with Limited English Proficiency, and Section 1557 of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.?The initiative also builds on HHS’s Strategic Plan FY 2018 – 2022, Objective 1.3 to improve access to healthcare and expand choices of care and service options, and Healthy People 2030 objective HC/HIT-D11 to increase the proportion of adults with limited English proficiency who say their providers explain things clearly.

OMH is dedicated to improving the health of racial and ethnic minority populations through the development of health policies and programs that will help eliminate health disparities. Through its demonstration projects, OMH supports the identification of effective approaches for improving health outcomes with the ultimate goal of promoting dissemination and sustainability of these approaches.

A technical assistance webinar for potential applicants was held on June 24, 2022, at 3:30 PM ET. Watch a recording of the technical assistance webinar .

This notice solicits applications to support the development and implementation of new policies and innovative practices to address policies that may create or perpetuate health disparities and may contribute to structural racism. OMH expects recipients to address health disparities among racial and ethnic minority populations, and to demonstrate the impact of those efforts on outcomes and the overarching goal of advancing health equity.

This initiative will build upon the OMH-funded FY2021 Framework to Address Health Disparities through Collaborative Policy Efforts Initiative. In doing so, recipients will utilize and build on the tools developed under the coordinating center established under a cooperative agreement with the National Network of Public Health Institutes (NNPHI) (www.nnphi.org). Recipients under this announcement will utilize the developed assessment framework and tools from the coordinating center and other established frameworks/tools. Recipients will demonstrate the effectiveness of these tools to increase the capacity of community-led teams to identify policy impacts that may create or perpetuate health disparities by contributing to structural racism.

A technical assistance webinar for potential applicants was held on June 9, 2022 at 3:00 PM ET. Watch a recording of the technical assistance webinar .

This notice solicits applications for projects for the Demonstrating Policy Effectiveness to Promote Black Youth Mental Health Initiative. This initiative seeks to identify health and wellness policies that are successful in improving Black youth mental health, including suicide prevention. The demonstration projects are expected to: (1) implement evidence-based policies for addressing Black youth mental and suicide prevention; (2) pilot the policy assessment protocols that determine the level of effectiveness of general health and wellness policies in improving Black youth mental health in diverse settings; and (3) develop and implement demonstrations of selected innovative and culturally effective policy approaches to improve Black youth mental health.

This initiative aligns with: (1) recommendations from the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) Emergency Taskforce outlined in “Ring the Alarm: The Crisis of Black Suicide in America;” and (2) Healthy People 2030 Mental Health Disorder and Adolescent Health Objectives MHMD-02 (Reduce suicide attempts by adolescents) and AH-D02 (Increase the proportion of children and adolescents with symptoms of trauma who get treatment).

A technical assistance webinar for potential applicants was held on May 5, 2022 at 4 PM ET. Watch a recording of the technical assistance webinar .