A Community Engagement Advisory Board as a strategy to improve research engagement and build institutional capacity for community-engaged research

Abstract

PurposeCommunity engagement is deemed as critical to the success of the CTSA program. In 2009, to improve research engagement and build capacity for community-engaged research across the translational spectrum, the Center for Clinical and Translational Science at the University of Illinois at Chicago created a Community Engagement Advisory Board (CEAB). Here, we report results of our ongoing evaluation efforts.MethodsCEAB activities are evaluated using mixed methods. Annual CEAB evaluation surveys were completed from 2010 to 2016 (n=106 respondents). In 2014, two 90-minute focus groups were conducted with a subset of recent CEAB members (n=19).ResultsSurvey data suggest respondents perceive their consultations to be helpful in improving the capacity of researchers (90%) and the quality of research projects (80%). Further, CEAB members perceive themselves to have personally benefitted from their involvement including obtaining new knowledge (84%), expansion of their networks (76%), and forming new community linkages (51%). Results of the qualitative data were consistent with survey data.ConclusionsOur CEAB has improved research engagement and developed institutional capacity to conduct community-engaged research in several ways. Our findings can inform the establishment or enhancement of community engagement services for CTSA-affiliated researchers and community partners.

Community advisory boards: Experiences and common practices of clinical and translational science award programs

“…Several CTSAs have reported on the work of their individual CABs [5][6][7]. While previous work has documented the use of CABs across CTSAs [2,11], to our knowledge, our study is the first to extensively document CAB implementation practices across CTSAs.…”

“…The content of the instrument was determined based on team members' knowledge and experiences with CABs and through reviewing the literature to identify gaps and questions used in previous studies of CTSAs [2]. This review identified only two papers with data related specifically to CTSA CABs published prior to the time of survey development, even though others were published after we fielded our survey [5,6,11]. Halladay's paper about researchrelated CABs that are working with their CTSA informed specific questions we included about CAB practices [7], but we found only one paper reporting data collected across the CTSAs published at the time of survey development that included questions specifically about CTSA CABs [2] and this paper did not describe implementation practices.…”

“…Community advisory boards (CABs) can serve as a valuable strategy for engaging and partnering with communities in research [1][2][3][4][5][6][7]. CABs have the potential to provide researchers with the perspective of those most affected by health inequity, to help build authentic community-university relationships and trust, and to increase the relevance and effectiveness of research.…”

Addressing community health needs through community engagement research advisory boards

“…CAB members represent various patient and community organizations and groups. Major CAB functions are to provide advice to researchers on substantive aspects of research projects, foster bidirectional conversations and co-learning, along with community-academic partnership facilitation [10,11].…”

“…The structure and functions of CTSA-formed CABs have been described [10,12], along with self-evaluation or process outcomes such as member satisfaction, improved knowledge and training capacity, and perceived benefits (e.g., networking opportunities) [8,10,13,14]. In addition, researcher experiences associated with consulting with CAB members were reported [12].…”