ACHIEVE Graduate Students Awarded Community Engagement Fellowship Grant from Carolina Center for Public Service

ACHIEVE is thrilled to announce that a Community Engagement Fellowship Award from the Carolina Center for Public Service, has been awarded to three ACHIEVE graduate student team members to directly support ACHIEVE’s efforts to pilot bi-directional conversation guides for patient and provider conversations. ACHIEVE graduate students, M. Kelly McHugh of the UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health Department of Health Behavior and Elizabeth Anne Finnessy of the UNC School of Nursing together received a fellowship for their proposed project titled Shifting Power through Communication: Bi-Directional Conversation Guides for Patients and Clinicians. ACHIEVE team member Hiba Fatima, a doctoral student of the UNC-Chapel Hill Department of Maternal and Child Health, co-developed the project proposal and will partner in its implementation and completion. Their efforts will be supported by the ACHIEVE Community Engagement Core’s leads, Jennifer Medearis-Costello and Dr. Alexandra Lightfoot.

Project Background

In an earlier phase of the ACHIEVE project, our team engaged with our community coalition, patients, and providers to tailor evidence-based guidelines to several NC clinical sites’ unique environments. Through this process, ACHIEVE’s partners raised a need for resources to guide both providers’ respectful communication about the urgent health situation of hypertensive disorders of pregnancy (HPD), and patients’ communication to providers about oft-dismissed symptoms.

Project Description

We are using a human-centered design approach to develop the conversation guides. Since our partners raised the idea for the guides, we have conducted environmental scans of the literature on similar tools, hosted three content brainstorming sessions with different groups of community partners, created logic models to scaffold our work, and compiled our findings to identify themes in the data. Currently, we are creating our prototype using the identified themes, and with the support of this award, we will undertake a thorough piloting of the prototype with our partners. The piloting process for the guides will help us to ensure that the materials that arose from our community engagement are responsive to partners’ requests and goals by iterating on our initial designs to develop more useful tools.

For more information on the award and its recipients follow this link to the Carolina Center for Public Service website.