“Engaging Patient Research Leaders in Developing Comparative Effectiveness Research (CER) Priorities for Post-Incarceration Health Care for African Americans with Serious Mental Illness”
(2018-2020)
African Americans with serious mental illness are disproportionately impacted by the criminal justice system, and often struggle to engage in health care post-incarceration. While services to help ex-offenders with serious mental illness transition from incarceration exist, these are seldom focused on physical health needs and healthcare access. More rigorous research is needed to determine what services are most effective for African Americans with serious mental illness. Furthermore, research for this population rarely involves patients in research. In a previous PCORI Engagement Award our patient/stakeholder advisory board developed a curriculum to train African American patients with serious mental illness as research leaders, and to train researchers and healthcare stakeholders about community-based participatory research (CBPR). While the previous project focused more broadly improving physical health equity for African Americans with serious mental illness, patients and stakeholders at our trainings wanted to focus on research to improve post-incarceration healthcare. This project utilized the PCORI-funded Inspiring Change CBPR curriculum and accompanying leadership seminar to train and engage a collaborative of patients, stakeholders, and researchers, including representatives from key community organizations (e.g. Safer Foundation and Trilogy, Inc.) around post-incarceration health. We held a series of seminars with the overarching goal of developing and prioritizing a comparative effectiveness research (CER) research agenda for post-incarceration health.
You can visit the conference website here https://2020inspiringchangehopeconfere.godaddysites.com/
This study was funded by the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI). For more information contact Project Lead, Lindsay Sheehan at lsheehan@iit.edu