“Integrated Care and Patient Navigators for Latinos with Serious Mental Illness”
(2014-2017)
People with chronic and disabling psychiatric disorders show significant disease burden with high rates of co-occurring physical illnesses that are often further disabling or may lead to death. The healthcare needs of people with serious mental illness are exacerbated by ethnic health disparities. Latinx with serious mental illness show significant health problems compared to the general population. Making this worse are the disparities in healthcare services for Latinx compared to the majority culture. In 2014, a coalition of advocates, providers, and researchers from the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) were awarded a grant by the Patient-Centered Outcome Research Institute (PCORI) to better understand the problem, develop a program of Peer-Navigators and Integrated Care for Latinos with serious mental illness, 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 a mixed methods research program meant to understand the health disparity problem. We learned from this work that peer navigators might be an effective approach to helping Latinx with mental health condition(s) engage in and fully benefit from the integrated healthcare system. The CBPR team used findings from our mixed methods research to develop this peer navigator program.
This study was funded by the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI). For more information contact Project Lead, Patrick Corrigan at corrigan@iit.edu
Publications
Corrigan, P.W., Sheehan, L., Morris, S., Larson, J., Torres, A., Lora, J.L., Paniagua, D., Mayes, J.I., & Doig, S. (2018). The impact of a peer navigator program in addressing the health needs of Latinos with serious mental illness. Psychiatric Services, 69(4), 456-461.
Corrigan, P. W., Torres, A., Lara, J. L., Sheehan, L., & Larson, J. E. (2017). The healthcare needs of Latinos with serious mental illness and the potential of peer navigators. Administration and Policy in Mental Health and Mental Health Services Research, 44(4), 547-557.