[MUSIC] What we'd like to do now is to talk about community advisory boards. Community advisory boards are made up of several different types of stakeholders. They can comprise lay community members, religious leaders, healthcare providers, community advocates, legislative representatives. And in essence community advisory boards, or CABS, are a strategy to incorporate communities on research teams and to solicit their input on all stages of research. >> And we wanted to dedicate time specifically to talk about community advisory boards, although it's just one strategy with which to recruit community members and engage them, because it's so commonly applied not just in research, but also within medical education and health system improvement. >> The Johns Hopkins Center for Health Equity has a community advisory board that we'd like to take some time to highlight as an example of a successful CAB that has been engaged in a lot of the Center's research activities and dissemination efforts. The Community Advisory Board has over the past seven years been longitudinally partnered with community members and representatives from several different backgrounds. These backgrounds include national organizations, medical or health systems, educational partners, professional societies, the government, so at the state level in particular, community and faith-based organizations and businesses. The Center's Community Advisory Board meets on a quarterly basis and is co-chaired by a community representative who is the director of a local non-profit organization, Reverend Debra Hickman and then Dr. Lisa Cooper, who is a Center's Executive Director. And one of the key features of the CAB is that it provides a forum for community members and other stakeholders, as well as members of the research team affiliated with the Center, to talk about the research that's being done, the needs of the community and how each side can help the other. Which speaks to the role, again, of CBPR in facilitating bidirectional information flow and capacity building. And it also, again, addresses that idea of mutual benefit between researchers and community stakeholders. So the community partners that make up the Center's Community Advisory Board represent over 40 different organizations. In this slide we have displayed the logos of some of the community partners, which include the American Diabetes Association, Sisters Together in Reaching, The men and Family Center, the Maryland Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, and the American Medical Association. This slide features many different entities that make up the Community Advisory Board, and really represent the breadth of organizations that have been engaged over the past seven years of the CAB's existence. We also have a range of health system partners, partners who are local to Baltimore City, partners that are from the State of Maryland and even a health system partner from Redding, Pennsylvania. And these health system partners are engaged in one of the more recent research endeavors taking place at the Center. The Community Advisory Board is a prime example of a relationship-centered approach in action. Over the past seven years, the relationships between the CAB members have evolved. And has gone from unidirectional, where researchers would come in and talk about the project and solicit some feedback, but mostly share information about what is going on, to bidirectional, where community members and researchers not only share information about projects, things taking place in the community, but also learn from one another. And in like manner, the relationships have gone from being hierarchical, where the researchers are at the top, to be more inclusive, where there is a sense of equity between the researchers who are part of the Center and the community members and stakeholders who are part of the CAB. And then there are several of the core principles that were outlined in our previous discussion that underlie the CAB and the Center's relationship with the Community Advisory Board. Communication, shared power, trust, respect, concordance in values and knowing one another and being familiar with one another. In this slide, there's an image of the Center's director with one of the CAB members, and there are several different ways that the CAB has influenced the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Equity. The CAB works with the Center to provide education and outreach to the community regarding the conduct and the results of the research. They're closely partnering with one another to ensure that not only is the research relevant and timely, but also that the process by which the research is done, is done in a manner that is respectful to the community. And builds their capacity in different dimensions of community capacity building, as well as individual and family level capacity building. Also, the CAB and the Center collaborate together across all phases of the research, from planning the actual study that is hoped to be funded, to implementing this study upon receipt of funding. To evaluating the study and developing measurement tools to assess whether or not the interventions that are part of the study are effective. And then translating and disseminating the results of that study in various forms, whether it's through the peer review process or in community settings. The other thing that the CAB does for the Center is that it's broad representation across the Baltimore community really ensures that the work of the Center is not only important on a broader scale, but also on a local scale. That it's relevant to the people who are most proximally located to the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Equity. I want to provide an example of the CAB and its impact on an actual study that's taking place at the Center right now, the RICH Life Project. RICH Life stands for reducing inequities ind the care of hypertension, lifestyle improvement for everyone. And the CAB was central to the RICH Life being created and receiving funding and now in it's implementation phase. In the planning phase, the CAB played a role in developing and refining job descriptions for the frontline staff who make up the RICH Life Project. And that would be the care managers and community health workers who are working to implement the interventions that both the CAB and the researchers developed together. Similarly, they also collaborated to develop the training curriculum for the care managers and community health workers. What this looked like was helping to not only develop the curricular content or the training program, but also some of the CAB members even worked as instructors for the actual training. The CAB has been involved in co-developing the marketing and the patient recruitment materials. And so during various CAB meetings, the research team and CAB members came together to review marketing materials and make sure that they were easy to read, that they had a color scheme that was appealing to people. And that in essence, whatever the marketing and recruitment materials, the end product would be something that a patient would look at and want to be a part of the project. The CAB has also helped to plan major events associated with the RICH Life Project. In September of 2016, the RICH Life project had its kickoff meeting, and the CAB played a role in helping to create the agenda for that kickoff meeting. And we had several CAB members attend the kickoff meeting and participate in the actual meeting itself through being involved in a panel discussion and providing an overview of the Community Advisory Board to the attendees of the kickoff meeting. They've also been involved in the implementation process, and so they've been involved in the work groups that are part of the study itself. There's several different work groups that help to ensure that the project is moving forward as designed, and we've had CAB members participate in those work groups. They also help with troubleshooting emerging problems at the partnering sites that are part of the RICH Life Project. And as I mentioned before, they've been very deeply involved in helping to train frontline study staff. Finally, and a key part of the RICH Life Project and a lot of the CBPR initiatives underway in the Center, they have been a part of devising strategies to sustain the interventions. So that when the funding ends, the interventions will still be underway at the partnering health systems. [MUSIC]
