Community Engagement and Outreach Core

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The Community Engagement and Outreach (CEO) Core seeks to sustain and grow collaborative research addressing health equity in Oklahoma by directly involving communities, patients, and providers. A range of underlying health issues affects the tribal and rural populations in the state that contribute to Oklahoma’s burden of chronic illness. Nearly all communities in the state have high rates of diseases, including diabetes, heart disease, rheumatologic disease, and cancer, as well as poor indicators of future health, including obesity, substance abuse, low rates of health screening, and other unhealthy choices. As an original core in the Oklahoma Shared Clinical and Translational Resources (OSCTR), the CEO Core has successfully built relationships and collaborations, resulting in major statewide or community-oriented approaches to address these health issues. The core has supported two practice-based research networks and established the Oklahoma Primary Healthcare Improvement Cooperative (OPHIC) to provide test beds for primary care and pediatrics clinical and translational efforts to disseminate and implement research findings that improve healthcare delivery and health outcomes. The Core has supported the growth of research capacity and activities in tribal communities through the highly successful Tribal Engagement Unit and our unique partnerships. The Core will continue to work closely with its primary community partners, including the Southern Plains Tribal Health Board, which represents 38 federal tribes in the state and 55 tribal/IHS health facilities, the Cherokee and Chickasaw Nations, and OPHIC. In this renewal, the Public Health Institute of Oklahoma will become an additional primary partner to build on the recent successes of community-engaged research to address the pandemic. Together, these partnerships allow us to broaden existing activities and support infrastructure for community engagement efforts in rural, tribal, and other underserved populations. The CEO Core is establishing a new activity with this renewal that will utilize the community engagement studio model to help investigators improve engagement with communities and help our institutions identify barriers to effective engagement, as well as better align research and community priorities. The CEO Core activities are critical for sustained stakeholder engagement that allows our researchers to gather information from our communities, explore community research needs, protect communities from research risks unique to minority populations, resolve impediments to research efforts, and complete effective research projects. The CEO Core will continue to strengthen relationships between OSCTR partners that allow for durable and meaningful collaborations to address the primary health concerns in our communities and will develop and support infrastructure that increases research capacity within community partners.