Racism, health status, and birth outcomes: results of a participatory community-based intervention and health survey.

Many community-based participatory research (CBPR) partnerships address social determinants of health as a central consideration. However, research studies that explicitly address racism are scarce in the CBPR literature, and there is a dearth of available community-generated data to empirically examine how racism influences health disparities at the local level. In this paper, we provide results of a cross-sectional, population-based health survey conducted in the urban areas of Genesee and Saginaw Counties in Michigan to assess how a sustained community intervention to reduce racism and infant mortality influenced knowledge, beliefs, and experiences of racism and to explore how perceived racism is associated with self-rated health and birth outcomes.

A birth records analysis of the Maternal Infant Health Advocate Service program: a paraprofessional intervention aimed at addressing infant mortality in African Americans.

Recognizing that no single intervention was likely to eliminate racial disparities, the Genesee County REACH 2010 partnership, utilizing both "bench" science and "trench" knowledge, developed 13 broad-based, multi-faceted interventions to eliminate infant mortality. This article provides highlights from a recent birth records comparison analysis of the Maternal Infant Health Advocate Service (MIHAS) intervention, and is solely based on the records of 111 MIHAS clients, and a random sample of 350 African-American women residing in Flint, Michigan. The MIHAS clients were more likely than the comparison sample not to have graduated from high school (56% vs 35%, respectively, P<.