Project Summary
Background: Home visiting (HV) provides critical services to pregnant individuals and new mothers to impact maternal and child health. While HV programs are increasingly approached to partner on research studies, home visitors are typically lay health workers without formal research training, which can impede their meaningful involvement in research studies. The project team previously created the “Home Visitor Research Connection” (HVRC) online training specific to HV focused on research design, research methods, and interpreting and sharing research. This training has explicit linkages to patient-centered outcomes research (PCOR) and comparative clinical effectiveness research (CER) and was found to be acceptable and effective; however, stakeholders recommended areas to promote the training’s greater use.
Proposed Solution to the Problem: The project team will enhance the HVRC training by including PCOR/CER case examples illustrating the full life cycle of a research project, improve training accessibility by adding closed captioning and Spanish translation, and develop a strategic plan for promoting the training’s use across multiple websites used by home visiting programs for professional development.
Objectives: The project’s long-term goal is to increase the number of lay home visitors involved as partners in research. To achieve this long-term goal, this project has four aims: First, the team will develop a 4th training module consisting of two PCOR/CER case studies for the HVRC online training. Second, the project team will add closed captioning and Spanish translation for the entire HVRC online training to promote its accessibility for lay home visitors across the United States. Third, the project team will promote the uptake of the HVRC via its integration into several platforms that engage HV stakeholders, including HV researchers. Fourth, the project team will evaluate the implementation and effectiveness of the online training.
Activities: The project team will create a new training module that provides two PCOR/CER case studies of HV research from start to finish. This module will tie together concepts—including key PCOR and CER concepts—from the existing HVRC modules. The team will add Spanish translation for the entire training and insert closed captioning of all videos to increase accessibility. The team will work with stakeholders from across the HV research and practice communities to integrate the HVRC training into multiple websites used for home visitors’ professional development. Finally, the team will collect quantitative and qualitative data on different indicators of implementation and effectiveness.
Projected Outcomes and Outputs: The project’s long-term outcome (3+ years post-project period) is inclusion of more home visitors as stakeholders in HV research. The project team has identified more immediate outcomes related to reach (websites where training is housed), adoption (are home visitors and researchers using the training?), implementation (are home visitors completing the training?), effectiveness (are home visitors more knowledgeable and confident after completing the training?), and sustainment (are modifications needed to keep the training accessible to home visitors?) of the online training.
Patient and Stakeholder Engagement Plan: A 12-person Advisory Board will meet throughout the project. The project team is guided by several key “principles of partnership”—specifically, reciprocal relationships, co-learning, partnership, trust, and transparency. Compensation will be provided to all Advisory Board members.
Project Collaborators: Advisory Board members comprise a diverse set of HV stakeholders: researchers, model developers, managers, home visitors, and clients. Several stakeholders were part of the previous project that developed the initial HVRC modules and have provided considerable input on this proposal.