Project Summary
Background: North Carolina’s community-based mental health providers are experiencing rapidly changing behavioral health needs and an urgent demand for adapted behavioral health approaches due to a growing immigrant community. Yet these providers lack access to up-to-date information in their field, awareness of PCOR, and capacity to successfully implement new practices. El Futuro leads the Latino Mental Health Provider Network in North Carolina (named “La Mesita”) and so has direct access to over 300 individuals representing a broad and diverse service area statewide.
Proposed Solution: El Futuro will partner with community organizations providing mental health services to Latinos living in North Carolina to select relevant PCOR findings and use patient and other stakeholder voices and perspectives to guide and inform the organizational capacity building process to ensure uptake.
Objectives: The long-term goal is to bridge the research-to-practice gap between PCOR/CER findings and uptake by community organizations by improving the readiness of community organizations to successfully identify, take up, evaluate, and adapt PCOR findings that will improve Latino behavioral health outcomes.
- Introduce and initiate the uptake of a Latino mental health-relevant PCOR finding with two learning cohorts of four community organizations each
- Document learnings about general organizational readiness for PCOR uptake and implementation, and about the uptake of the specific, selected finding in the various types of community organizations participating in the learning cohorts, and disseminate these learnings across the state via the El Futuro Latino Mental Health Provider Network (“La Mesita”)
Activities: Two selected PCOR findings will be considered and one selected by the learning cohorts for uptake and implementation. Each organization will assess for uptake readiness and form a detailed action plan for readiness improvement and initiation of uptake. Participating organizations will take initial steps in the uptake process. Collective learnings will be documented and shared with a second learning cohort of four community organizations who will follow the same process while learning from the experience of the first learning cohort through meetings and ongoing facilitated conversations. Finally, all experiences will be shared with the El Futuro Latino Mental Health Provider Network (“La Mesita”) in order to help encourage uptake more broadly.
Outcomes: PCOR findings will be disseminated to at least eight Latino-serving community-based organizations in North Carolina, greatly expanding the audience and potential for implementation of these important results. A broad network of community organizations and providers in North Carolina will improve their organizational readiness for PCORI finding uptake. New learnings about nuanced readiness capacities and uptake processes at diverse types of community organizations will be documented and shared, paving the way for more successful and thorough dissemination projects in the future.
Patient/Stakeholder Engagement: The primary stakeholder groups to be involved in the project are Latino behavioral health patients/stakeholders and community organizations providing behavioral health services to Latino patients in North Carolina. El Futuro and organizations in the “La Mesita” network primarily work with Latinos from Mexico and Central America, so the project team will use patient perspectives from these multiracial and ethnic Hispanic/Latino groups to inform the ultimate selection of the PCOR finding of focus as well as identification of additional research needed in the future. A patient advisory council of four to six members will be recruited from El Futuro’s former patient population. (Because of the potential for interference in clinical treatment, no patients under active treatment will be recruited for participation.)