Christopher Chung On
10/20/2017
Evaluation of “Dismantling Racism”: An Anti-Racism Initiative Intervention in Southern County
Public Health Department (SCPHD)
The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the anti-racism initiative “Dismantling Racism”
(DR) intervention in a specific public health organization with the given pseudonym, Southern
County Public Health Department (SCPHD). Using the perspective of the socio‐ecological
model (SEM), we will analyze the levels of the SEM (individual, interpersonal, etc) in which this
intervention worked at, the main goals of their intervention, as well as assessing the strengths
and weaknesses of the intervention and suggestions for similar implementations. Lastly, we will
also discuss the SEM interactions that are present in regards to the public health issue of
institutional racism in healthcare or public health organizations and tie in to how this related to
our intervention in regards to its difficulties and the effects left on its participants.
The intervention, a program called “Dismantling Racism”, put on by an organizational
firm specializing in topics of racism called DRworks, was a behavioral intervention for a public
health agency in the Southern part of the United States that was given the pseudonym, Southern
County Public Health Department (SCPHD). In terms of the socio-ecological model (SEM), this
intervention was intended to target factors at the individual, interpersonal, and organizational
levels in the SCPHD.
The “Dismantling Racism” intervention was implemented on the SCPHD due to the anti–
racism initiative that was implemented by the organization to combat the racial issues it currently
faced as a public health organization. These were problems such as the history of racism in its
surrounding community, the known issues of organizationalized racism in the health field and
the racial tensions from the growing Latinx and Hispanic community to which it provided health
services. It has been documented that the health field suffers from organizational racism through
data that shows that people of color have significantly higher rates of mortality from conditions
ranging from cardiovascular disease to AIDS (1) due to reasons such as less allocation of time
and resources to patients and communities of color (1) or because of clinician attitudes towards
their patients which creates distrust between clinician and patient. (1)
In analyzing the “Dismantling Racism” intervention, we believe that it incorporated
constructs from theories such as the Health Belief Model (HBM), the Theory of Reasoned
Action (TRA), and the Social Cognitive Theory (SCT) to form how it tackled the problems at the
individual, interpersonal, and organizational levels in the SCPHD. The HBM describes that a
person’s belief about health problems, their perceived benefits and obstacles to acting on those
