Community Engagement and Outreach Core
- Professor, Family Medicine and Community Health, KU School of Medicine
- Director, Community Engagement and Outreach Core
Strategies to engage with patients, families, caregivers, neighborhoods, and communities are essential to conduct implementation research. Many investigators lack exposure, education and training in how to conduct research with vs. on patients and communities and therefore default to ineffective engagement. To mitigate this barrier, investigators must expand their collaboration and include individuals, organizations and community-embedded facilitators who have established prerequisite trust. Investigators are often unaware of these resources. Dr. Kessler will connect Research Project Leaders and other investigators with research networks and Dr. Jomella Watson-Thompson, Co-Investigator, will help them identify community collaborators and cultivate strong collaborations based on mutual understanding and trust. The vision for the Community Engagement and Outreach Core is to offer a comprehensive suite of services and training opportunities tailored to the specific needs of each project and community population.
Goals:
- Orient investigators to equity research and community engagement frameworks,
- Coordinate comprehensive engagement services for collecting community/provider perspectives to ensure study relevance and feasibility,
- Support breadth and depth of dissemination of findings to communities and stakeholders and
- Work with the Administrative Core to evaluate the implementation and effectiveness of the Community Engagement and Outreach core.
Cross-Core Coordination
The Community Engagement and Outreach Core will work with the Pragmatic Implementation Science Methods Core to gather provider/patient input for research design, collect qualitative data that informs research, and disseminate findings. We will also work with the Ethics Core on participant and site consent and recruitment, and in determining and delivering needed training in health disparity research.
Contact Us
Contact Dr. Sarah Kessler at skessler2@kumc.edu.
Orient investigators to equity research and community engagement frameworks and createengagement plans to support implementation research that is focused on equity. Our core team will guide project leads in the development of an engagement plan, adapted from the PCORI Engagement Plan Template. Our core team will meet with project leads on a quarterly basis to review engagement plans and benchmarks, share lessons learned, and troubleshoot barriers.
Provide comprehensive community engagement services for COBRE projects and the broader research community that successfully reaches populations experiencing health disparities. The Community Engagement and Outreach Core will link COBRE investigators with organizations and community-engaged professionals across Kansas that can facilitate culturally informed and competent engagement. Based on the engagement plan, the core will link investigators and their community partners using services and trainings to meet benchmarks for engagement.
Support dissemination of research project findings and methods for pursuing equity through community engagement. The Community Engagement and Outreach Core will support on-going engagement that ultimately will lead to breadth and depth of dissemination of research findings to stakeholders, including patients, clinicians, organizations, societies, and policy makers. Using a range of vehicles and approaches, the long-term goal of raising awareness of health disparities and implementation strategies to promote equity, will be a first step in promoting discourse on policies to help reduce these disparities.
Collaborate with the Administrative Core to evaluate the effectiveness of the Community Engagement and Outreach Core. The core will collect ongoing data required by the Administrative Core to evaluate core services. In addition, the core will collect data from project leads and pilot project awardees on community engagement activities in real time via the Community Check Box Evaluation System.