Bridging the gap between community health workers and researchers: Lessons learned from a behavioral trial for low-income adults with heart failure

Community health workers (CHWs) are gaining in popularity in health disparities and chronic disease research. However, a gap in understanding the perspective of the other remains between CHWs and researchers. This hinders the ability for both parties to work in tandem to develop and implement a successful trial. CHWs (via video or in person dependent upon conference scholarships) and their immediate supervisor will present lessons learned from the implementation of the Congestive Heart Failure Adherence Redesign Trial (CHART) patient level intervention.

Researchers are trained to answer specific questions by collecting and analyzing data from study participants, while CHWs are trained to work with individuals to promote healthy living within their own community. This presentation will give examples on how to train CHWs to understand research and how to train researchers to understand the community. We will demonstrate the value in formally teaching CHWs about research processes such as recruitment, intervention fidelity, and study protocols and in turn, how CHWs then contribute directly to these processes. Creating a bilateral relationship between CHWs and researchers serves to engage, retain, and effectively deliver interventions to underserved populations in research studies.