Presentation Abstract

Title: Community-Academic Partnerships as a Lever for Health Equity

There is growing interest in engaging communities, patients, and stakeholders as partners in the process of research.  This emerging approach to common research designs goes by a variety of names, among them, patient centered outcomes research, community-based research, participatory research.  One umbrella term, engaged scholarship, underscores the concept that those who are to be researched are now engaged in the conduct of research. There These research approaches ask us to prioritize and put at the heart of our work the needs and wants of those at "margins" - patients and communities we hope to serve with the research products. This “centering the margins” requires researchers to democratize the process to include direct participation by the stakeholders, giving a them meaningful voice in designing and evaluating the impact of research according to stakeholder outcomes. This approach acknowledges the unique strengths and insights that patients, families, stakeholders and academic partners bring to framing health problems and designing solutions and marks a radical shift in power dynamics of how research is conducted and for whom it is intended to work. In engaged scholarship, each setting provides its own unique opportunities and challenges that are rooted in the social, historical and economic context of that community. Understanding the upstream drivers of health in communities and the way these drivers may play out in research partnerships are foundational in engaged approaches and critical to advancing health equity.

About Dr. Corbie-Smith

Giselle Corbie-Smith is Kenan Distinguished Professor, Departments of Social Medicine and Medicine, School of Medicine, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC), and Director of the UNC Center for Health Equity Research. She is internationally recognized for her scholarly work and expertise in community-engaged and patient-oriented research. Using both qualitative and quantitative methods, she has empirically studied the methodological, ethical, and practical issues of research to address racial disparities in health. As a practicing internist, Dr. Corbie-Smith has infused her clinical training into her research, using her experiences with patients and communities in a Federally Qualified Health Center as a bridge to ensure the relevance of both the clinical and community-engaged research she has conducted.

For the last 20 years, Dr. Corbie-Smith’s program of health equity research has been funded with grants from the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI), Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities, and National Human Genome Research Institute, among others. She co-chaired the 2008 National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases conference on Diabetes and Obesity Disparities and the 2010 NHLBI conference on Cardiovascular Disease Prevention in High-Risk Rural Communities. Since 2004, she has been the principal investigator on grants to support Project GRACE, a community-based participatory research partnership in eastern North Carolina that has developed, tested, and disseminated interventions to prevent HIV and CVD. She is also the principal investigator on an NHLBI Midcareer Investigator Award in Patient-Oriented Research (K24) to mentor junior faculty on patient-oriented research in CVD prevention.

Dr. Corbie-Smith established the UNC Center for Health Equity Research to bring together collaborative, multidisciplinary teams of scholars and community members to (1) improve health in underserved communities through a shared commitment to health equity, innovation, and translational research, and (2) train early-stage investigators to perform innovative research, strengthen their skills in addressing social determinants of health and health disparities, and learn ways to contribute to policy change. She also serves as Deputy Director for Engagement of the North Carolina Translational and Clinical Sciences Institute (UNC’s NIH Clinical and Translational Science Award) to engage communities, faculty, and health care providers as partners in clinical and translational research to ultimately transform the way academic investigators and community members work together to improve health. She was recently elected to the National Academy of Medicine in recognition of these scientific contributions as the interface of medicine and public health.

Dr. Corbie-Smith did not disclose any conflicts of interest for this workshop.