Community engagement education in academic health centers, colleges, and universities.

Community engagement (CE) is critical for advancing health equity and a key approach for promoting inclusive clinical and translational science. However, it requires a workforce trained to effectively design, implement, and evaluate health promotion and improvement strategies through meaningful collaboration with community members. This paper presents an approach for designing CE curricula for research, education, clinical care, and public health learners.

Self-reported race and ethnicity of US biobank participants compared to the US Census.

Precision medicine envisions a future of effective diagnosis, treatment, and prevention grounded in precise understandings of the genetic and environmental determinants of disease. Given that the original genome-wide association studies represented a predominately European White population, and that diversity in genomic studies must account for genetic variation both within and across racial categories, new research studies are at a heightened risk for inadequate representation. Currently biological samples are being made available for sequencing in biobanks across the USA, but the diversity of those samples is unknown.

Does State Legislation Improve Nursing Workforce Diversity?

A health-care workforce representative of our nation's diversity is a health and research priority. Although racial and ethnic minorities represent 37% of Americans, they comprise only 16% of the nursing workforce. The purpose of this study was to examine the effect of state legislation on minority recruitment to nursing.

Increasing participation in genomic research and biobanking through community-based capacity building.

Achieving equitable minority representation in genomic biobanking is one of the most difficult challenges faced by researchers today. Capacity building--a framework for research that includes collaborations and on-going engagement--can be used to help researchers, clinicians and communities better understand the process, utility, and clinical application of genomic science. The purpose of this exploratory descriptive study was to examine factors that influence the decision to participate in genomic research, and identify essential components of capacity building with a community at risk of being under-represented in biobanks.

Calorie postings in chain restaurants in a low-income urban neighborhood: measuring practical utility and policy compliance.

Current strategies for combating obesity include recent federal legislation mandating calorie count postings in chain restaurants. This study describes the current practice of menu board calorie postings in a low-income urban neighborhood, identifies the extent to which current practice complies with existing policy, and evaluates the practical utility of menu boards to consumers. We conclude that although most postings were legally compliant, they did not demonstrate utility.

Measuring the process and quality of informed consent for clinical research: development and testing.

Purpose/objectives: To develop and assess the reliability and validity of an observational instrument, the Process and Quality of Informed Consent (P-QIC).

Design: A pilot study of the psychometrics of a tool designed to measure the quality and process of the informed consent encounter in clinical research. The study used professionally filmed, simulated consent encounters designed to vary in process and quality.

Changes in the institutional review board submission process for multicenter research over 6 years.

Although collaborative research across sites is essential to increase the statistical power and generalizability of research findings, the need to undergo multiple institutional review board (IRB) reviews is a challenge. The purposes of this paper are to describe changes in the IRB submission process in 2 national multisite studies before and after the implementation of the Health Information Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) Privacy rule (2002 and 2008) and to discuss implications for policy and practice related to human subjects research. In the second study, there was a shorter mean approval time and reduced variability in the decision about the level of review, the mean number of pages per application doubled, and an increased proportion of IRBs required conflict of interest and data use agreements.

Evaluation of statistical approaches in quantitative nursing research.

The purposes of this study were to (a) develop a tool to assess statistical methods and (b) use the tool to evaluate recently published quantitative research. We rated the statistical approaches used in 152 studies published in the 5 top impact-factor nursing research journals from September 2005 to August 2007. Studies were generally of high quality; 45% scored between 80% and 100%, and 22% achieved a score of 100%.

Consent administrator training to reduce disparities in research participation.

Purpose: The aims for this paper are to summarize the current state of disparities in clinical research participation, discuss regulatory and interpersonal causes for these disparities, and to suggest an approach to address this problem by standardized training for consent administrators.

Organizing Construct: A program based on the Precede-Proceed model for training consent administrators is proposed and described.

Conclusions: The current process for informed consent for research is unstandardized and inadequate, and may contribute to racial and ethnic disparities.

Including marginalized populations in HIV clinical trials: a new role for nurse-researchers.

This article proposes a new paradigm for nurse-researchers to strengthen communication with participants, investigators, and the community in clinical trials. The author reviews the current state of HIV vaccine development in response to the human and fiscal cost of the HIV epidemic, both in the United States and globally. A translational model is proposed for restructuring the process by which participants in HIV trials are recruited and the results disseminated.