Using Collective Impact to Develop a Community-Led Initiative for Improving Black Infant Mortality.

The United States has one of the highest infant mortality rates among developed countries. When stratified by race, disparities are more evident: Black infant mortality rates are 2.5 times higher than non-Hispanic white infants.

Evidence of Effectiveness of a Home Visitation Program on Infant Weight Gain and Breastfeeding.

Objectives: Adequate weight gain is important to reduce the risk of infant morbidity and mortality. Breastfeeding is also important to prevent infant morbidity. Home visitation programs have been used for many years to prevent infant and child morbidity and maltreatment.

An Unexpected, Yet Welcomed Outcome of the St. Louis Healthy Start Program.

Introduction Racial disparities in birth outcomes are a significant problem in the U.S. The St.

Flipping Classrooms in a School of Public Health.

Alternative course formats are gaining increasing attention in higher education. The literature provides a number of examples and studies of flipped classrooms in the medical sciences and liberal arts and sciences. However, fewer than five papers on flipped classes in graduate public health courses have been published, and none in health management.

Evaluating a train-the-trainer approach for improving capacity for evidence-based decision making in public health.

Background: Evidence-based public health gives public health practitioners the tools they need to make choices based on the best and most current evidence. An evidence-based public health training course developed in 1997 by the Prevention Research Center in St. Louis has been taught by a transdisciplinary team multiple times with positive results.

A method for building evaluation competency among community-based organizations.

Community-based organizations often lack the capacity (e.g., time, staff, skills) to effectively evaluate programs, policies, and environmental changes.

The impact of SLHS program on perinatal indicators.

The federal Healthy Start program began 20 years ago, yet outcome evaluations lack sufficient rigor to draw conclusions on program impact. We evaluated the impact of the Healthy Start program on birth outcomes, prenatal care, and public services utilization. Birth record data for the St.

A qualitative assessment of factors that influence emergency medical services partnerships in prehospital research.

Objectives:   Recent efforts to increase emergency medical services (EMS) prehospital research productivity by focusing on reducing systems-related barriers to research participation have had limited effect. The objective of this study was to explore the barriers and motivators to participating in research at the agency and provider levels and to solicit suggestions for improving the success of prehospital research projects.

Methods:   The authors conducted a qualitative exploratory study of EMS personnel using focus group and focused interview methodology.

Lessons learned from a decade of focused recruitment and training to develop minority public health professionals.

From 1999 to 2009, the Eliminating Health Disparities Pre-doctoral Fellowship Program provided specialized education and mentoring to African American graduate students in public health. Fellows received a public health degree, coursework in understanding and eliminating health disparities, experiential learning, mentored research, and professional network building with African American role models. We describe successful strategies for recruiting and training fellows and make 5 recommendations for those seeking to increase workforce diversity in public health: (1) build a community of minority students, not a string of individual recruits; (2) reward mentoring; (3) provide a diverse set of role models and mentors; (4) dedicate staffing to assure a student-centered approach; and, (5) commit to training students with varying levels of academic refinement.

Barriers and facilitators of African American participation in Alzheimer disease biomarker research.

African Americans experience a greater risk of Alzheimer disease (AD), but are underrepresented in AD research. Our study examined barriers and facilitators of AD research participation among African Americans. Investigators conducted 11 focus groups with African American participants (n=70) who discussed barriers and facilitators to AD research participation including lumbar puncture studies.

More than Tuskegee: understanding mistrust about research participation.

This paper describes results of a qualitative study that explored barriers to research participation among African American adults. A purposive sampling strategy was used to identify African American adults with and without previous research experience. A total of 11 focus groups were conducted.

Construct validity of the core competencies for public health professionals.

Measuring the competency of the public health workforce is critical to improving the functioning of the public health system. This study investigated the construct validity and reliability of the Core Competencies for Public Health Professionals, as promulgated by the Council on Linkages Between Academia and Public Health (COL). Principal component analysis, correlation and reliability analysis and known-groups comparisons were utilized.

Psychosocial determinants of intention to screen for Alzheimer's disease.

Background: There is little information about how receptive older adults are to discuss memory problems with healthcare providers. Here we test the psychosocial factors explaining older adults' intention to undergo screening for Alzheimer disease (AD).

Methods: A population-based, random-digit dialing strategy surveyed 1,039 older adults.

Bridging research and practice through competency-based public health education.

Reducing the gap between research and practice is gaining much needed attention. Schools of public health can play a role by ensuring that students are taught the necessary knowledge and skills to translate research into practice and to effectively disseminate research and other public health information. Competency-based education is one mechanism by which this can occur.

Factors influencing organ donation decisions by African Americans: a review of the literature.

The purpose of this article is to review the literature from 1980 to 2005 regarding organ donation decision making by African Americans for themselves and their loved ones and recommend improvements in subsequent studies. Using the behavioral model of health services utilization as an organizing framework, the review procedure consists of a (1) search of health and medical literature using several key words and eight indexes, (2) selection of articles based on specific criteria, and (3) review of each article with regard to the population and sample used, study design, dependent variables addressed, and its findings. The review indicates that predisposing, enabling, and need factors each influence African Americans' organ donation decision making.

Development of a population-based questionnaire to explore psychosocial determinants of screening for memory loss and Alzheimer Disease.

Alzheimer disease research has focused on detecting the earliest signs of cognitive decline and efforts are ongoing to develop biomarkers and cognitive measures that reliably distinguish between nondemented and demented individuals. However, little is known about factors that may directly or indirectly influence screening behavior of older community-dwelling adults. We describe an iterative process for the development and formative evaluation of a questionnaire about dementia knowledge and screening behaviors in older adults to understand the psychosocial factors underlying intention to obtain dementia screening to profile individuals manifesting intention to undergo dementia screening compared to those who will not.