IHPS & Community-based Participatory Research

Alison Cohen, PhD worked on a community-based participatory health survey in partnership with the San Francisco Housing Development Corporation to understand the experiences of residents of affordable housing in Hunters Point in San Francisco during the pandemic.  She also recently completed a multi-year project led by Mujeres Unidas y Activas, a Bay Area nonprofit that is led by and works with Latina immigrant women. The project documents the organization's history and evaluates its approach to violence prevention. Alison has also looked at  how community-based organizations in the Bay Area responded to the pandemic and on a community-based participatory study documenting environmental health inequities in the industrial zone of Marseille, France.

Mara Decker, DrPH’s team began a formal partnership in 2020 with the California Consortium for Urban Indian Health on an assessment of domestic violence in California Native American communities to identify root political and historical causes and risk and protective factors. This project builds on years of community-based research and partnerships by Shira Rutman prior to joining Dr. Decker’s team. They are also building on partnerships and previous work to examine systemic inequities in Native reproductive health in national data. Native scholars in Indigenous decolonizing methods, sexual violence, maternal and child health, and policy will guide the examination to represent Native values, account for cultural and historical context, minimize potential harmful effects, and to ensure the research is directly useful to Native people.

Mara’s group also partners with the Fresno County Superintendent of Schools and the Fresno Economic Opportunities Commission to implement the Rural Education and Development for Youth (READY) program. This program engages youth, their families, and local services to improve young people's well-being and sexual and reproductive health. They are collaborating with seven young women in the area to participate as Mystery Clients in an evaluation of adolescent sexual and reproductive health services in Fresno County. The Mystery Clients called clinics and pharmacies to assess availability of services, such as contraception and STI testing, as well as the youth-friendliness of those who answered their calls. IHPS researchers worked with the Mystery Clients throughout the study design, implementation, and dissemination of results. Youth participants have joined IHPS staff in presenting their findings locally and at various national conferences.

Elizabeth Dzeng, PhD, MD, MPH is a hospitalist, sociologist, and ethicist who draws upon sociological, human centered design, and community-based participatory research methodologies to promote health equity in hospital and end-of-life care. Much of her work focuses on understanding and addressing the impacts of racism on hospital-based care. She is funded by a NIA Beeson award and a Cambia Sojourns Scholar award to understand how structural racism across the life course influences the quality of end-of-life care for older Black adults. This community-based participatory research (CBPR) study has been carried out in partnership with a community advisory board (CAB) who advise the study team around study aims, materials, and outputs. Recognizing that efforts to center Black narratives in this study may inadvertently cause harm by forcing community members to recount difficult experiences with racism, Dr. Dzeng and her team have also worked to implement the principles of restorative justice into the study’s methodology to prevent harm, promote healing, and preserve relationships. Ultimately, the study will draw on these relationships by convening Black community members and hospital leaders to create systems-level interventions to address structural racism in end-of-life care.

She has also co-led the development, implementation, and eventual evaluation of a health advocate program for Black patients who are hospitalized at UCSF’s hospitalist services. The program has been developed in partnership with a community advisory board and aims to improve the quality of care for hospitalized Black patients, which includes both improving care outcomes as well as increasing the provision of life-affirming and compassionate hospital care for this population. She has also been working with hospital medicine colleagues on a partnership with GLIDE Memorial church to create a longitudinal program to change the culture around anti-racism and equity in the Division of Hospital Medicine and beyond.

Sarah Garrett, PhD is the principal investigator of Multi-Stakeholder Engagement with State Policies to Advance Antiracism in Maternal Health (MEND), a cross-disciplinary project that, under the guidance of and in collaboration with a community advisory panel. MEND was guided by an advisory board of Guided by an advisory board of 3-4 individuals representing the population that lawmakers intended SB464 to benefit: Black women and birthing people. Sarah worked with legal scholars to interpret the history and content of Senate Bill 464 (SB464, 2019), which mandated that perinatal providers undergo implicit bias training with the goal of improving clinical outcomes for Black women and birthing people. She also engaged Black women and birthing people and perinatal clinicians in the San Francisco Bay Area to learn how the law can be implemented to fit their realities and priorities. She also engaged with legal, scholarly, and community input, drafted evidence-based guidance for local and state implementation of the new laws.

Bob Hiatt, MD, PhD has directed the San Francisco Cancer Initiative (SF CAN) since 2015 with funding from the Helen Diller Family Comprehensive Cancer Center to reduce the cancer burden in the City and County of San Francisco, particularly focusing on preventable cancers among people of color. Multiple community-based organizations are involved as partners and collaborators.  SF CAN partners implement culturally-sensitive, community education and outreach to improve cancer screening rates for some of the city’s most devastating cancers.

Hilary Seligman, MD, MAS acted as Senior Medical Advisor for many years to Feeding America and prior to that was “Lead Scientist and Senior Medical Medical Advisor”.  Feeding America partners with food banks, food pantries and meal progams to combat hunger. She currently helps with the development of their nutrition standards and supports their partnerships with healthcare.

Dean Schillinger, MD has a long-standing collaboration with YouthSpeaks, a community-based spoken word and art collective for marginalized youth, called The Bigger Picture. This campaign produced narrative videos professionally based on poems created by youth artists of color with the purpose of encouraging and inspiring other youth and young adults, especially Latinos and African Americans, to identify the social and environmental forces that create and perpetuate obesity and diabetes, and to defy the beverage industry by consuming less sugar and by participating in advocacy efforts. Subsequent research by Dean and his team have shown the effectiveness of these communication strategies. The Bigger Picture has expanded to include  police violence, climate change, COVID-19 and other ways structural violence disproportionately impacts the health of marginalized communities.

Leslie Suen, MD works on a qualitative project evaluating the intervention of distributing safer drug use supplies (clean needles, pipes, foils, etc.) to patients with substance use disorders upon discharge from the hospital at Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital. Patients receive them as part of addiction care from members of the ZSFGH Addiction Care Team. 

Leslie and her team have completed approximately 40 interviews with patients and ZSFGH hospital staff who have cared for these patients to evaluate the impact of this intervention. SF AIDS Foundation has been an essential partner, donating the supplies to ZSFGH since 2021 and also providing their expertise on drafting the interview guide, guiding the research questions, and helping with data interpretation and manuscript preparation.