About Us

Community Outreach

Health Partnership Program: Progress, Opportunities, And Challenges
Themes from Group Discussions

February 25-26, 2002 (historical)

Tuesday, February 26, 2002

1) Overarching themes

  1. Partnership
    1. Trust
    2. Transparency
    3. Mutual respect
    4. Increasing the number and range of community partners
  2. Accessibility
    1. Transportation
    2. Translation
    3. More sites
    4. More services
    5. More non-weekday and non-daytime accessibility
  3. Representativeness
    1. More partners
    2. More sources of partners
  4. Sustainability
    1. Training community members to continue the work
    2. Enhancing partnerships with local government agencies and other Federal agencies
    3. Ensuring continuing commitment and funding

2) Clinical Research/Clinical Care

  1. Community review of research proposals
    1. Use focus groups to determine community opinions about proposed research topics and approaches
    2. Develop a community review board with power to veto a protocol
    3. Ensure community representation on NIH Institutional Review Boards (IRB)
    4. Establish mechanisms for community-generated research to be conducted through the HPP
  2. Dissemination of research results
    1. To patients and participants
    2. To health care providers
  3. Ethical safeguards in clinical research
    1. Make full information available to all parties
  4. Full representation in clinical research
    1. Broad recruitment and outreach
    2. More community partners
  5. Communication of clinical care information to community care providers
    1. Include health care professionals among partners
    2. Provide continuing education opportunities to providers
  6. Professional education for community health care providers about clinical research enrollment and collaboration opportunities
    1. Wide availability of HPP literature and protocol information to health care providers

3) Career Recruitment

  1. Generate training "pipelines" for a wide variety of careers
  2. Outreach and educational activities to students at all levels of age and education
  3. Make minority scientists and health care providers visible in the community as role models
  4. Encourage mentoring of community members by HPP and others
  5. Provide internships and training opportunities
  6. Collaborate with partners, other local and Federal agencies, and educational institutions to optimize contacts and opportunities and ensure the best use of resources

4) Public Health Education

  1. Use wider variety of media for health education materials, given that some people gather information from written sources with difficulty: be aware of literacy level, use of illustrations, formality of language, etc.
  2. Use wider range of locations for making such materials available to the public
  3. Use wider variety of health-related activities
  4. Target populations in their language and with culturally appropriate materials and presentations

5) Evaluation Methods and Targets

  1. Obtain general agreement with the need for intermediate and long-term goals and evaluation
  2. Use a variety of methods to accomplish this
  3. Use validated tools whenever possible, so results can be compared with other communities and programs
  4. Use information available from a wide variety of sources in assessing the impact of the HPP
  5. Assess impact in the NIH, in the community, and in the HPP