Community Grand Rounds: Enhancing and Expanding Community Partnerships for Population Health Improvement on the South Side of Chicago

Community participation in population health improvement can help university researchers target intervention resources more effectively and efficiently, leading to more effective implementation of interventions, because of joint ownership of both process and product. Investigators and community members have created a series of seminars call Community Grand Rounds, which gave community members the opportunity to educate university investigators about their approaches to community health and revitalization, describing both opportunities and challenges. In turn, university investigators were able to provide a series of educational seminars in the community that discussed current and future university related initiatives that are designed to address the challenges and opportunities in health disparities as they exist at the community level, but also inviting community members to provide their perspectives and insights into the development of future interventions through a community engagement model.

A bidirectional communications process was established with community members that helped to influence trans-disciplinary health investigations at a university. The process began by hiring community residents to serve as consultants. Those community consultants provided the topics that were to be discussed during each Community Grand Rounds based on the needs of their communities. Once the relevant issues of the communities were established, the community consultants helped to create the format and the content for each Community Grand Rounds. Each of the communities represented agreed to host a community grand round in their respective community. All of the Community Grand Rounds involved educational opportunities that included resource materials and relevant data.