The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality has published a new brochure that offers recommendations on how to increase the use of community-based participatory research (CBPR) in the United States. CBPR—which partners community leaders and organizations with researchers in studies largely conducted in disadvantaged communities—has been used successfully in social science research, but it is underused in health care research.
The recommendations call on community leaders and research funding organizations, as well as colleges and universities, to build and maintain mutually beneficial, trusting relationships and make use of powerful community-based organizations and other grassroots groups in the design and conduct of studies. The recommendations also urge researchers to involve community leaders in the grantmaking process and encourage community leaders to serve on university institutional review boards.
Copies of the brochure, Creating Partnerships, Improving Health: The Role of Community-Based Participatory Research (AHRQ Publication No. 03-0037), are available from the AHRQ Publications Clearinghouse.
Editor's Note: These recommendations are part of a series made by community leaders, representatives of funding organizations, and health care researchers at a national conference held in November 2001, that was supported by AHRQ, the W.K. Kellog Foundation, and other organizations.
Select to access a summary of the conference.
The papers presented at the meeting were published July 16, 2003, in a special issue of the Journal of General Internal Practice.
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