Community Partnerships
Approaches and Goals
The CDH is developing relationships with a variety of community, academic, and government-based organizations and individuals who share interests in:- identifying the causes and consequences of disparities in health and health outcomes;
- improving the knowledge, skills and attitudes of healthcare providers;
- developing community-academic partnerships;
- exploring the collection, analysis and dissemination of minority health data; and
- enhancing the diversity of the UW Health Sciences and campus.
Our relationship building activities tend to fall into the following categories:
Partnerships
The CDH is actively developing mutually beneficial relationships with others; creating an environment in which trust is fostered; shared and distinct values of partners are recognized and honored; and collaborative participation to achieve the goals of the partnership is valued.
Brokerage
The CDH often acts as a broker or liaison for the purpose of fostering new or enhancing existing relationships between University programs and researchers and community-based organizations. Community-based organizations can include Native American nations and other groups representing or composed of people who traditionally experience health disparities.
Consultation
We offer technical assistance in several areas in which cultural sensitivity and competence is most essential. This includes: assisting colleagues with identifying community partners who share interests in disparities in health and health outcomes; lending insight into community-academic partnerships that may be experiencing distress; reviewing strategies or proposals for establishing new community-academic partnerships; and providing recommendations for strengthening such proposals.
Our success in addressing disparities in health in Wisconsin depends greatly on our success as partners, brokers, and consultants, and our ability to strategically share resources with others. Strong partnerships offer the potential to create interdisciplinary teams of academic and community-based scholars; to generate better informed hypotheses about the causes and consequences of disparities in health; to develop more effective and sustainable interventions; and, to enhance the translation of research results into the training and practice of future health care providers and academicians. As such, our Community Partnership activities are inextricably linked to our activities in Research and Education & Training.
We have already begun attracting a diverse array of scholars to our Center, including new faculty in the SMPH and the School of Pharmacy. Additionally, we have become a campus resource to new and continuing faculty in the Schools of Social Work, Human Ecology, Nursing, and Education, to name a few.
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