Innovative Recruitment and Retention Strategies in a Community Based Intervention for the Bangladeshi Population: Challenges and Lessons Learned

The DREAM Project is the first large scale Community Health Worker (CHW) research project promoting diabetes management in the U.S. Bangladeshi community. The goal of the project is to improve knowledge among Bangladeshi individuals with diabetes and provide diabetes management tools through group and one-on-one educational sessions by trained (CHWs). This presentation will review innovative strategies employed in recruiting and retaining participants in the eight month DREAM Pilot intervention.

Building upon their strong community organizing background, DREAM CHWs used outreach skills to recruit participants. Various recruitment venues were targeted, including places of worship(such as mosques and temples during religious events), street corners heavily populated Bangladeshi neighborhoods, cultural and community events, apartment buildings with a large number of Bangladeshi residents, and at a local hospital with large numbers of Bangladeshi patients. Recruitment was also conducted through strategically placed advertisements in the leading Bengali newspapers in the U.S. Through this intensive recruitment, DREAM was able to recruit 74 eligible participants in a span of three months.

In order to minimize attrition, the project implemented multiple retention strategies. Theses included hosting multiple make-up sessions at times and venues that are of convenience to participants including their homes and community centers, and offering incentives such as raffles and other prizes to motivate participants to attend the sessions. In addition, DREAM has created creative hand-outs such as a calendar for participants to record their upcoming sessions and doctors visits. These strategies have demonstrated an improvement in retention rates across the first set of sessions.