“Integrated Health Care for African Americans with Mental Illness who are Homeless”
(2013 – 2016)
People with serious mental illness get sick and die at much higher rates than same-aged peers.
This pattern is significantly worse in people of color. In 2012, a coalition of advocates, providers, and
researchers from Heartland Health Outreach (HHO), Advocates for Human Potential (AHP), and the
Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) were awarded a grant by the National Institute of Minority Health
and Health Disparities to better understand the problem, craft a program meant to impact these health
inequities, and evaluate the program in a rigorous pilot study. We did this in the frame of Community
Based Participatory Research (CBPR), partnering with people with lived experience to develop the
qualitative research program meant to understand the health disparity problem. We learned from this
work that peer navigators might be an effective approach to helping African Americans with mental
illness engage in and fully benefit from the primary care health system. The CBPR team used findings
from our qualitative research to develop this peer navigator program.
This study was funded by the National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities (NIMHD). For more information contact Project Lead, Patrick Corrigan at corrigan@iit.edu
Publications
Corrigan, P. W., Kraus, D., Pickett, S., Schmidt, A., Stellon, E., Hantke, E., & The Community Based Participatory Research Team. (2017). Peer navigators that address the integrated healthcare needs of African Americans with serious mental illness who are homeless. Psychiatric Services, 68(3), 264–270. PMID: 28093056
Corrigan, P.W., Pickett, S., Batia, K. & Michaels, P.J. (2014). Peer navigators and integrated care to address ethnic health disparities of people with serious mental illness. Social Work in Public Health, 29, 581-593.
Corrigan, P.W., Pickett, S., Kraus, D., Burks, R., Schmidt, A., & the Health Disparities Consumer Research Team. (2015). Community based participatory research examining the health care needs of African Americans who are homeless with mental illness. Journal of Health Care for the Poor and Underserved, 26, 119-133. PMID: 25702732
Corrigan P, Pickett S, Schmidt A, Stellon, E., Hantke, E., Kraus, D., Dubke, R. & The Community Based Participatory Research Team (2017). Peer navigators to promote engagement of homeless African Americans with serious mental illness in primary care. Psychiatry Research, 255, 101-103. PMID: 28535474