Kansas Center for Implementation Science: Community Engagement and Outreach (CEO) Core

PROJECT SUMMARY/ABSTRACT: COMMUNITY ENGAGEMENT & OUTREACH (CEO) CORE Engaging with patients, families, caregivers, neighborhoods, and communities is an essential feature of implementation research. Meaningful engagement requires trust, which comes from sustained collaboration over time. In the case of rural research, substantial distances between researchers and stakeholders create even more serious challenges to meaningful engagement. In addition, community-tailored approaches—informed through partnerships with those individuals and communities—are essential for making a meaningful impact on population health. The vision for the Community Engagement and Outreach (CEO) Core is to offer a comprehensive suite of educational opportunities and facilitating services that accelerate stakeholder engagement for researchers to achieve maximal engagement effectiveness. The specific aims of the CEO Core are to: Aim 1. Orient investigators to research and community engagement frameworks and create engagement plans to support implementation research. The CEO Core team will guide Research Project Leaders in the development of an engagement plan, adapted from the PCORI Engagement Plan Template. The CEO Core team will meet with Research Project Leaders on a quarterly basis to review engagement plans and benchmarks, share lessons learned, and troubleshoot challenges. Aim 2. Provide comprehensive community engagement services for COBRE projects and the broader research community that successfully reaches populations with unmet health care needs. The CEO Core will link investigators with organizations and community-engaged professionals across Kansas that can facilitate context-aware and community-tailored engagement. Based on the engagement plan, the CEO Core will link investigators and their community partners using services and trainings to meet benchmarks for engagement. Aim 3. Support dissemination of research project findings through community engagement. The CEO 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. Aim 4. Collaborate with the Administrative Core to evaluate CEO Core effectiveness. The Core will collect ongoing data to evaluate and improve services.