A Note from the Editor

As the year draws to a close, we mark the passing of one of the giants of dentistry in the 20th century, especially in the work of the National Dental Association and its reconciliation and partnership with the American Dental Association. Dr. Clifton O. Dummett, Professor Emeritus at the University of Southern California and the youngest Dean of the Meharry School of Dentistry (a post to which he was appointed in 1949) died in September of this year. We will miss him here at JHCPU: He was a regular contributor to these pages (most recently in August 2010), a counselor, and trusted colleague to everyone in this office.

As Dr. Rueben C. Warren and Dr. Nagueyalti Warren reported in these pages (JHCPU 16.1 February 2005), Clifton O. Dummett was born in 1921 in Georgetown, British Guiana (Guyana, South America), coming to the United States in 1936, where he attended Howard University in Washington D.C. and Roosevelt University in Chicago, from which he obtained his Bachelor of Science degree. He graduated from Northwestern University Dental School in 1941 and also received the MScD in periodontics from Northwestern University. He completed studies in Public Health Dentistry as a Fellow of the Julius Rosenwald Fund, receiving the MPH degree from University of Michigan in 1947. Dummett was a Diplomate of the American Board of Oral Medicine and a Diplomate of the American Board of Periodontology. He was the first African American to become board certified in periodontology. He received numerous honorary degrees from institutions of higher education, the most recent from Meharry Medical College. Dr. Dummett is survived by his wife and frequent co-author, Mrs. Lois Dummett. For more on Dr. Dummett, his father (Dr. Alexander Adolphus Dummett), and his son (Dr. Clifton O. Dummett Jr.), please see the salute to their very accomplished family by Dr. J.W. Jamerson that appeared in JHCPU 19.1 February 2008.

Clifton Orrin Dummett Sr.

Turning now to the present issue, we present it in four parts:

• • Limited English Proficiency

• • Metabolic Syndrome and Asthma

• • Communication and Mental Health

• • Policy

Each of these is introduced further below.

Supplementing the present issue is a volume guest-edited by Dr. Valerie Montgomery Rice, Dr. Sakina Eltom, and Dr. Paul Tchounwou, for the NIH program, Research Centers in Minority Institutions (RCMI) (JHCPU 22.4 Suppl). That volume includes a select group of papers that grew out of work presented at the biennial RCMI conference, held here in Nashville in December 2010. We were very happy to work with the Guest Editors and with the project manager, Ms. Danielle Baker, on this excellent collection.

Part 1: Limited English Proficiency

The Commentary by Bailey and colleagues from Northwestern's Feinberg School of Medicine that opens the section of the present issue on Limited English Proficiency (LEP) recommends means of improving the comprehensibility of prescription labels for LEP patients. Next, a Report from the Field by a team from Temple University documents a series of interventions called Hablamos Juntos (funded by RWJF) designed to improve patient-provider communication for Latinos.

DeCamp and colleagues (all RWJF Clinical Scholars) investigated linguistic barriers to care for Latino children. Specifically, they studied differences among Latino children by parental language-of-interview with respect to having a medical home or not: those whose parents spoke Spanish when interviewed, even after confounders were controlled for, were significantly less likely than the children of English-speaking Latino parents to have a medical home.

Initiating a theme we will see taken up again later in the issue, Thiel de Bocanegra and colleagues from UCSF investigated the quality of reproductive services to LEP patients, comparing the records of new female patients whose appointment was mediated by a linguistic interpreter (language discordant, LDI) with those of women whose appointment was with a language concordant clinician (LC). They report that the medical records of LDI visits were significantly less likely than those of LC visits to contain documentation of education and counseling services and less likely to have documentation of sexually transmitted infection risk assessment.

Part 2: Metabolic...