Project Summary
Research shows African-Americans receive substandard advanced illness care, which can include inadequate symptom management, poor patient-provider communication, care inconsistent with their preferences, and higher rates of hospitalization during end-of-life care. This is thought to be due to a general mistrust of the healthcare system and negative experiences in clinical encounters.
Interventions to address these disparities often fail because of insufficient patient and community engagement. Faith-based organizations serve as a trusted leader within the African-American community. C-TAC’s Community Action Project, in partnership with researchers from Johns Hopkins Medicine, proposes to develop a nationally-representative, community-based, PCOR-trained network of African American churches engaged to lead partnerships with researchers and health-systems to develop, complete, and disseminate PCOR-related programs to better address disparities in advanced illness care among African-Americans.
The projected outputs from this project are two national and two regional workshops to develop a nationally representative, community-led, PCOR-trained network of African-American churches and faith-based organizations ready to partner with experts, researchers, and hospital networks to complete and disseminate PCOR and policy interventions that address health disparities for those with advanced illness.
Project collaborators include the Coalition to Transform Advanced Care (C-TAC); UNITED, a collaboration with New Shiloh Baptist Church (Baltimore, Maryland), First Baptist Church of Highland Park (Landover, Maryland), and Johns Hopkins University; Hartford Memorial Baptist Church (Detroit, Michigan); The Pennsylvania Avenue Baptist Church (Washington, DC); Alameda County Care Alliance (ACCA); Congregational Health Network - Memphis Model, Pastors4PCOR, and co-chairs and members of the C-TAC Interfaith and Diversity Workgroup.