Research Project
10281659
Community Engagement and Outreach Core Project Summary High-quality clinical and translational research (CTR) improves public health by moving scientific innovations from pre-clinical, to clinical, and, finally, to population health solutions that address priority health concerns across the nation. The Community Engagement and Outreach (CEO) Core?s responsibility is to enable and enhance CTR by facilitating collaboration among research, practice, and community stakeholders as they seek to address and resolve regional health issues. This requires active engagement with clinical and community systems that would ultimately adopt, implement, and sustain new research-developed innovations. The CEO Core developed a number of community-engagement, team science, and outreach resources to ensure that the work we do is relevant and fills the needs in rural and underserved populations in our region. Our aims include activities and resources focused on 1) establishing regional health priorities and increasing capacity to conduct community-engaged CTR to address these priorities, 2) facilitating the production of high-quality and locally relevant community-engaged CTR, and 3) communicating and promoting network research findings, project opportunities, and resource availability across member, community, Practice-based Research Network (PBRN), and stakeholder groups. Innovative aspects of CEO include a Summer Institute for Community- Engaged CTR for both researchers and community partners and a Community-Engaged Research Incubator to support the development of large-scale CTR projects. CEO established a Community Advisory Board (CAB) that includes representatives from across the region that our network serves with broad representation of community organizations, healthcare, and public health. The CAB goals include the identification and prioritization of regional health concerns, contributing to the review process for proposed Pilot and Scholar applications, and helping distribute research findings to the communities we serve. In addition, CEO provides resources for community members and investigators to stay up to date with network activities by accessing our community-centered Community Conversations blog, event calendar, presentations, seminars, and Science Cafes. The CEO also maintains a Clinical Trials portal, a Community-engaged Studies portal, a Community Collaborators Registry, and CITI Training resource page. The CEO hosts seminars and workshops in partnership with the Professional Development Core and other content Cores to provide the tools and training that improve community-engagement practices and to help researchers understand and prioritize community concerns that might be addressed with CTR projects. We will continue to make available on our website recorded videos from our seminars/workshops. The Core supports a regional PBRN that works to merge clinical practice with evidence-based research. Finally, CEO also provides services and consultations to help CTR investigators engage community members and organizations while concurrently providing opportunities for community members and organizations to better engage CTR researchers to address high-priority issues.
