26 Feb Health research must be anchored in community narratives

It’s the way forward to achieve health equity.

By Sharon Attipoe-Dorcoo, MedPage Today

There’s an effort afoot to exclude the voices of Black communities from K-12 education, evident in the recent gutting of the AP Black History courseopens in a new tab or window, as well as local and state legislation limiting educationopens in a new tab or window on race. My experiences as a health researcher and evaluator, and a Black woman from Ghana, have shown me the dangers of excluding narratives, at least in the provision of equitable health. If we hope to achieve health equity, we need to switch from a paradigm of doing research on — or “to” – communities, to doing research as community, where those we hope to help invite us in. We need to do better in our research and evaluation design by anchoring in community — creating programs that communities themselves want, help design, and execute.

In working towards creating health research and evaluation systems grounded in equity, us health scholars have to start asking ourselves if our work is in service to the communities we serve, or an extraction mill, churning evidence that perpetuates inequities and harm. Communities can be defined either from the lens of the final beneficiaries of our scholarship, or the partnerships we develop as proxies. For example, I have spent several years studying the impact of mobile health clinics. In these projects, I did not work directly with patients served by mobile health clinics, but rather the healthcare delivery teams and advocates. I developed a survey and asked these teams and community advocates to complete it, but quickly found that would not fly.

Several weeks went by with no responses to my survey even after email follow-ups. Instead, I needed to seek an invitation into the community, to build trust as someone coming in to partner with them — not to extract for my gain, advancing my own research and career. I needed to show a spirit of true partnership. I did that by seeking opportunities to attend various meetings, and sharing how my experiences and knowledge could be a collective part of their important work. I also maintained connections with the community by staying in touch with their leaders, sharing my progress, and continuing to build relationships with individuals who completed my surveys. I am glad to say that once I was invited, I was in. I still collaborate with the community and I attribute the success of a recent publicationopens in a new tab or window to our relationship. Read more …