Progress in Community Health Partnerships-Research Education and Action最新文献

Underserved communities have been disproportionately affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. The Project Promoting Engagement and COVID-19 Testing for Health (PEACH) study was designed to understand the attitudes, beliefs, and infrastructure associated with COVID-19 risk, testing, and prevention behaviors in people living with, caring for, or at risk for type 2 diabetes. The purpose of this joint community-academic partnered manuscript is to share lessons learned for maintaining community partnerships through the challenging times of a pandemic. New and existing community partners were invited to share their perceptions about the facilitators and barriers of partnering with academia during the COVID-19 public health crisis. Key facilitators included those partners felt heard and their input valued. And the changing nature and demands in response to the pandemic on the partners' responsibilities were among the key challenges. Successful maintenance of the partnerships required flexibility, creativity, and a willingness to adapt engagement as community partners responded to the needs of their communities.

Background: Schools are rich sites for collaborations between health and educational sectors.

Objectives: To identify lessons learned from formation of a community-academic partnership and application of community-based participatory research (CBPR) to develop a model that integrates community health workers into schools.

Methods: Individuals from an academic medical center, a large public school district, and a community-based research institute applied CBPR principles to reimagine schools as a place for improving the health of children.

Lessons learned: Three lessons emerged. Leveraging each team member's expertise centered the partnership on community strengths, co-learning, and stakeholder engagement. Adherence to CBPR's principles of power sharing and equity helped navigate the challenges of collaboration between large institutions. Early focus on sustainability helped address unexpected issues, build capacity, and boost advocacy.

Conclusions: This partnership demonstrates how CBPR fosters conditions in which equitable partnerships between research institutions and public schools can thrive to promote childhood health.

This paper demonstrates the use of a memorandum of understanding (MOU) to accelerate our ability to implement and maintain mobilization of community partner networks. To provide equity-centric severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2 virus [COVID-19]) testing and vaccination to historically medically underserved areas in a densely populated metropolitan district, Cobb & Douglas Public Health (Georgia) partnered with Wellstar Health System (Wellstar) through an MOU. Wellstar activated its Congregational Health Network to target COVID-19 testing and vaccination sites, identified by review of local COVID-19 transmission data. The MOU enabled rapid deployment of public health and health care resources, which grew into a consortium that held 141 local events that provided more than 3,000 tests and 10,000 vaccinations. Health care organizations can use an MOU structure to establish partnerships and increase equity-centric COVID-19 testing and vaccination accessibility for disparate communities.

Objective: There is a scarcity of research on sexual health education among women in South Asian diasporic communities in Canada, resulting in a need for designing culturally relevant approaches to teach about sexual health and HIV prevention, seen as taboo topics. This community-based research study was designed to determine the effectiveness of using culturally relevant stories as a model for sexual health education for South Asian immigrant women (Toronto, Canada).

Design: South Asian women participants were randomly allocated to either a fact-based intervention (n = 40) or a story-based intervention (n = 38). Focus group data from fact-based and story-based educational workshops were thematically analyzed and interpreted using the parasocial contact hypothesis.

Findings: Although participants found the fact sheets to be informative, they were not culturally relevant. The educational sessions using stories were judged to better meet this criterion with many participants feeling the information was relevant to their community, useful for friends and families, and relatable to their lives. Participants assigned considerable value to the family as an important site for sexual health education. Finally, study participants, particularly those who had the storytelling intervention talked about the importance of having a safe space to discuss taboo topics like sexual health.

Conclusions: Learning about sexual health through stories is deeper relative to static fact sheets. Both play a role in helping South Asian women learn about sexual health and HIV prevention; however, story sharing was seen as a culturally relevant approach that emphasized the role of the family in sexual health conversations. Family life educators and other health practitioners need to draw on cultural competence as they design culturally relevant material and interventions for sexual health education.

Community-engaged research often poses challenges due to exactly those qualities that make it desirable: it provides a new model of research that differs in many ways from top-down, university-led, prospectively designed approaches. While many have discussed the challenges to conducting community-engaged research, few have provided precise and generalizable lessons for how to surmount these challenges. Here we discuss the challenges experienced in a project that was community-engaged at three levels: 1) a research team consisting of an academic and a community partner as well as a community and academic research assistant, 2) the research team engaged with a Community Advisory Board called the CBOP-CERB (Community Based Organization Partners-Community Ethics Research Board) throughout the project, and 3) the research involved recruiting community participants from an area with a historical distrust of researchers and research: Flint Michigan. We also discuss administrative challenges that this multilevel community-engagement posed. Most important, we provide practical lessons in order for future community-engaged research to avoid or mitigate many of these challenges.

Background: Community-partnered participatory research (CPPR) is a research approach that supports equitable collaboration of community and academic co-leaders in research and policy. Despite CPPR's 25-year history, infrastructure supporting community members in bidirectional learning has not been formalized.

Objective: This paper describes processes and procedures using CPPR to plan conferences to develop community leadership training infrastructure.

Methods: We utilized rapid ethnographic analysis to examine conference planning processes for community leadership in CPPR. Community and academic leaders in Los Angeles, New Orleans, and Chicago met weekly over two months to plan, given COVID-19, three Zoom conferences on a leadership training institute for CPPR, with planning for (1) community co-leadership in research and policy; (2) local and national CPPR programs; and (3) models for bidirectional training.

Results: The planning process emphasized bidirectional learning for community and academic members for research and services/policy to benefit communities, within a Community Leadership Institute for Equity (C-LIFE) to promote equity and power sharing for community leaders. The planning process identified major themes of framing of C-LIFE conference planning goals, developing the conference structure, promoting equity and diversity, envisioning the future of CPPR, challenges, collaborations, future curriculum ideas for C-LIFE, evaluation and next-steps for Zoom conferences in November 2020.

Conclusions: It was feasible to use CPPR to plan Zoom conferences to promote community leadership training across multiple sites. Key planning themes included promoting equity, addressing structural racism, bidirectional learning and integrating community, academic, and policy priorities with community co-leaders as change agents.

Background: People with intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD) are at high risk for unmet health care needs and face barriers to equitable care, yet few health professions students receive adequate training to meet these needs.

Objectives: An interactive panel discussion with Special Olympics Pennsylvania (SOPA) athletes and staff was planned and implemented so that health professions students/trainees would gain knowledge of IDD, health barriers, SOPA resources, and volunteer opportunities.

Methods: Panelists included two SOPA athletes and their mentors; questions solicited responses about personal health care experiences (Fall 2019). Attendees completed a mixed-methods post-event survey capturing event satisfaction, reflections, and interest in learning more about patients with IDD.

Results: Sixty individuals attended, and 43 (72%) completed post-event evaluation. Attendees reported high satisfaction (88%), desire for future trainings (100%), and interest in learning about communicating (88%), providing care (88%), and addressing IDD health barriers (91%).

Conclusions: Collaborative community panels could be effective in engaging health care students in discussion about caring for patients with IDD.