Primary Submission Category: Place/Communities
An Approach to Building Community Impact: Best Practices for Co-Creating Community Health Data Reports
Authors: Jennifer Wong, Charlie H. Nguyễn, Laura C. Wyatt, Victoria Foster, Stella Yi, Simona Kwon,
Presenting Author: Jennifer A. Wong*
Background: NYU Langone and community-based organization (CBO) partners co-developed and administered a community health survey to identify cancer-related needs and assets in diverse, low-income, under-researched immigrant communities in the Perlmutter Cancer Center (PCC)’s New York City catchment area of lower Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, Nassau, and Suffolk counties.
Objectives: We present a community-based participatory research process to generate seven community-facing data findings reports led in partnership with the PCC’s community advisory board and advisory network of CBOs and community leaders.
Methods: An iterative, community-engaged process included multiple rounds of discussion and consensus-building across a team of data analysts, programmatic staff, community health workers, and community partners to a) prioritize data to include in summary reports, and b) reach agreement on report format. Understanding community plans to utilize data and data findings (e.g., resource allocation, community outreach, program planning) guided report layout and design. We elicited input through regular facilitated meetings with CBO partners, open-ended discussions, data presentations, and group voting to reach consensus on community-preferred topics of interest, change solutions, dissemination modalities, and community-identified language needs.
Results: Community report design, content, and delivery represent a collective effort to present meaningful data report-back that may be used to guide actionable research, policy, and practice decisions and to inform community health programming and initiatives that address cancer health disparities in under-resourced communities.
Conclusions: Multi-level, multi-year engagement strategies help to sustain active bidirectional exchange and partner involvement in the community-academic research co-design process. Delivery of tangible support during regular touchpoints maintains trust between partners.