Building healthier lifestyles piece by piece: A community-academic partnership to strengthen monitoring and evaluation capacity along the Mississippi Gulf Coast

Background: Gulf Coast Health Educators (GCHE) was founded to meet the health education needs of underserved Gulf Coast residents by promoting healthy lifestyles, teaching diabetes self-management skills, and increasing community awareness. With funding from the Johnson & Johnson Community Healthcare Program, GCHE has been able to monitor program outcomes that demonstrate the effectiveness of health education in the prevention and treatment of chronic disease. Methods: Using a collaborative approach, the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health worked with GCHE staff to build their in-house capacity in monitoring and evaluation. Results: After two years of a community-academic collaboration, GCHE has gained valuable skills in the development and implementation of their monitoring and evaluation plans including: design of a conceptual framework with SMART objectives and appropriate indicators, database creation, data analysis, and dissemination. Preliminary results demonstrate the effectiveness of the Diabetes program in teaching 174 participants self-management skills such as meal planning, glucose monitoring, and proper foot care. Additionally, 333 adults participating in the Healthy Lifestyles Program learned skills to improve their health with the goal of preventing chronic diseases. Conclusion: Partnerships between community-based organizations and academic institutions provide a unique opportunity to increase their sustainable in-house capacity for program evaluation. These partnerships also provide an enhanced understanding of key factors essential for improving the access to and quality of medical services, as well as overall health promotion of underserved populations living along the Mississippi Gulf Coast.