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APHA Scientific Session and Event Listing

Recorded presentation

Sarena D. Seifer, MD, University of Washington School of Public Health and Community Medicine, Community Campus Partnerships for Health, UW Box 354809, Seattle, WA 98195-4809, 206-616-4305, sarena@u.washington.edu, Kristine Wong, MPH, Community-Campus Partnerships for Health, UW Box 354809, Seattle, WA 98195-4809, and Sherril B. Gelmon, DrPH, Mark O. Hatfield School of Government, Portland State University, PO Box 751, Portland, OR 97207-0751.

Many prominent national groups are calling upon health professional schools to be more engaged in their communities, including the Institute of Medicine, the Pew Health Professions Commission and the Commission on Community-Engaged Scholarship in the Health Professions. All of these groups advance community-academic partnerships as an essential strategy for improving health professional education, increasing health workforce diversity and eliminating health disparities. Unfortunately, community engagement often conflicts with how faculty are recognized and rewarded. A commonly cited barrier to sustaining faculty involvement in communities is the failure of university promotion and tenure systems to adequately recognize or reward faculty members for community-based research, teaching and service. By developing a more supportive academic environment for community-engaged scholarship, the ability of academic institutions and community partners to collaborate in educating future health professions, generating community-relevant knowledge and building healthier communities will be significantly advanced. With funding from the Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education, Community-Campus Partnerships for Health is facilitating the Community-Engaged Scholarship for Health Collaborative, a group of 9 health professional schools that are working to build capacity within their institutions, as well as their peers nationally, for community-based participatory research, service-learning, and other forms of community-engaged scholarship. These schools have identified review, promotion and tenure issues as major impediments to sustaining and expanding community-engaged scholarship. Each school has formed a team of faculty, administrators, and community partners to lead the change process. The teams are supported in their campus change efforts through ongoing opportunities for training, technical assistance and information-sharing.

Learning Objectives:

• Define community-engaged scholarship
• Describe at least three typical barriers to community-engaged scholarship faced by faculty members in public health
• Describe at least three strategies used by the Community-Engaged Scholarship for Health Collaborative to overcome these barriers
• List at least three examples of universities that have instituted faculty review, promotion and tenure policies and processes that recognized and reward community-engaged scholarship

Keywords: Organizational Change, Practice-Based Research

Related Web page: www.ccph.info

Presenting author's disclosure statement:

Any relevant financial relationships? No

Recorded presentation