Suchergebnisse

<p class="Pa6"><strong>Objective: </strong>Community-based participatory research processes build healthy communi­ties, as well as promote trust and genuine collaborative partnerships between stake­holders. Fostering relationships is essential to promoting these partnerships, which are necessary for collaborative, coordinated, and integrated efforts toward improving health outcomes in the community. The ob­jective of our research was to demonstrate social network analysis as an evaluative tool to assess movement toward positive health outcomes through promoting relationships.</p><p class="Pa6"><strong>Method: </strong>Using the example of the Gulf States Health Policy Center Coalition based at Bayou Clinic in Bayou La Batre, Alabama, we demonstrate the ability of social network analysis (SNA) methods to measure and map the formation of relationships, as well as the level and frequency of these relation­ships. Data were collected via email using a survey of Gulf States Health Policy Center Coalition members (N=80, 87%) and analyzed using UCInet software for social network analysis in April 2016.</p><p class="Pa6"><strong>Results: </strong>In this application of SNA to the community coalition of the Gulf States Health Policy Center, we find that, on aver­age, coalition members doubled their own network within the coalition in a time pe­riod of &lt;2 years and were working together more often and more collaboratively than they were before the coalition formed.</p><p class="Pa7"><strong>Conclusions: </strong>The increased frequency and level of collaboration among the Coalition network was accompanied by a higher level of collaboration among the coalition members as posited by social network and capital theories. As such, the community en­gagement fostered through the Coalition has increased and thus, to date, the Gulf States Health Policy Center has been effective in promoting partnerships and collabora­tion. <em></em></p><p class="Pa7"><em>Ethn Dis. </em>2017;27(Suppl 1):337-346; doi:10.18865/ed.27.S1.337.</p>

Purpose. Examine the effectiveness of a community-based, multimedia intervention on medication adherence among hypertensive adults. Design. Randomized controlled trial. Setting. Rural south Alabama. Subjects. Low-income adults (N = 434) receiving medication at no charge from a public health department or a Federally Qualified Health Center. Intervention. Both interventions were home-based and delivered via computer by a community health advisor. The adherence promotion (AP) intervention focused on theoretical variables related to adherence (e.g., barriers, decisional balance, and role models). The cancer control condition received general cancer information. Measures. Adherence was assessed by pill count. Other adherence-related variables, including barriers, self-efficacy, depression, and sociodemographic variables, were collected via a telephone survey. Analysis. Chi-square analysis tested the hypothesis that a greater proportion of participants in the AP intervention are ≥80% adherent compared to the control group. General linear modeling examined adherence as a continuous variable. Results. Participants receiving the intervention did not differ from individuals in the control group (51% vs. 49% adherent, respectively; p = .67). Clinic type predicted adherence (p < .0001), as did forgetting to take medications (p = .01) and difficulty getting to the clinic to obtain medications (p < .001). Conclusions. Multilevel interventions that focus on individual behavior and community-level targets (e.g., how health care is accessed and delivered) may be needed to improve medication adherence among low-income rural residents.