Integrating tobacco control and chronic disease interventions to address disparities

Increased tobacco and chronic disease related morbidity and mortality plague underserved populations. The adoption of evidence-based interventions and best practices has proven to reduce mortality and improve clinical outcomes among minority and other disparately affected groups. However, the rate of adoption for best practice guidelines has been slow. The Pennsylvania initiative, Bringing Evidence-Based Research Initiatives to Disparate Groups with Evaluation (Be-A-BRIDGE), will facilitate the use of evidence-based, best and promising approaches and other research in practice through a multi-disciplinary collaborative effort aimed at improving public health infrastructure at the community level.

BE-A-BRIDGE assembled an extensive partnership of organizations and agencies to leverage their collective resources in order to build the capacity of organizations addressing tobacco-related chronic diseases by providing necessary resources and training. Through an exhaustive research process, BE-A-BRIDGE identified and critiqued evidence-based resources while simultaneously assessing the needs of community based organizations through a statewide capacity survey. The survey assists in identifying whether an organization's infrastructure can sustain the selection, implementation and evaluation of evidence-based programs and best practices. In addition, regional summits provided a broad-base educational platform for community organizations, practitioners and other community service groups to learn about health assessments, population-specific interventions, successful grant writing techniques and best practice guidelines. An innovative updateable web-based clearinghouse, utilizing a navigational matrix, houses BE-A-BRIDGE resources and training tools for information retrieval and dissemination. As a result, community based organizations are connected with tools to build effective and appropriate programs and interventions.