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292 Activating community health workers: A community-academic partnership to understand vaccine hesitancy.
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- Devyani Gore, Emily Stiehl, Mark Dworkin, Nadine Peacock, Naseem Parsa, Melissa Martin, Cornelius Chandler, Diana Ghebenei, Jennifer Hebert-Beirne
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- Journal:
- Journal of Clinical and Translational Science / Volume 8 / Issue s1 / April 2024
- Published online by Cambridge University Press:
- 03 April 2024, pp. 89-90
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OBJECTIVES/GOALS: In 2022, Chicago created the COVID-19 Response Corps, a cohort of community health workers (CHWs), trained to conduct contact tracing and vaccine outreach. Through an Earn and Learn program, corps members studied community-engaged participatory research, and co-led a rapid assessment with researchers to assess vaccine hesitancy in communities. METHODS/STUDY POPULATION: The Chicago COVID-19 Community Response corps worked to mitigate COVID-19 transmission in disadvantaged neighborhoods by activating CHWs, a diverse public health workforce from communities most affected by health and economic inequities. The Earn and Learn Program allotted 600 corps members up to 7.5 hrs/week of paid capacity building opportunities to learn new skills, pursue training programs, or college courses. Embodying a praxis of participatory action research and intergenerational organizing, corps members co-designed research questions and survey instruments, pilot tested the tools, trained other corps members on how to recruit and collect data, and contributed to the analysis and interpretation of the results. They generated evidenced-informed solutions to address future real-world problems. RESULTS/ANTICIPATED RESULTS: Corps members brought insight, cultural literacy, and lived experience that was invaluable in reaching the priority population of unvaccinated Chicagoans. They enhanced all aspects of the rapid assessment while conducting their work safely and comfortably in neighborhoods that outsiders consider challenging. Community member responses as to why they had not yet received a COVID-19 vaccine included being unable to risk putting what they saw as a rushed or improperly tested product into their bodies, to not being able to risk becoming ill even temporarily due to the potential for lost wages, as well as having other priorities in their lives which took precedence over concern about COVID-19, such as paying bills and feeding their families. DISCUSSION/SIGNIFICANCE: Research and evaluation benefits from the inclusion of CHWs. They are agile agents of change with the potential to replenish and repair trust in a fractured public health system. Engaging CHWs in evaluation work can strengthen community-academic partnerships and enhance the understanding of challenges and solutions to improving community health.
2 - Disrupting the Discourse of Under-representation: The Place of Rural Students in Australian Higher Education Equity Policy
- Edited by David Farrugia, University of Newcastle, New South Wales, Signe Ravn, University of Melbourne
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- Book:
- Youth beyond the City
- Published by:
- Bristol University Press
- Published online:
- 13 October 2022
- Print publication:
- 15 June 2022, pp 40-56
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Summary
Introduction
Australians living in regional and remote areas have been designated as a key higher education equity target group for more than 30 years. Yet despite ongoing efforts to seek parity and alter ‘the balance of the student population to reflect more closely the composition of society as a whole’ (Department of Employment, Education and Training, 1990, p 2), very little has changed. Given historically low rates of university participation for rural students and stagnant enrolment patterns even since the massification of higher education (Burnheim and Harvey, 2016), there is no question that Australians from regional and remote areas remain under-represented.
Indeed, rural Australians have been characterized as particularly difficult subjects of the government's equity agenda. As a result, it is commonplace for policy-makers and scholars to refer to the challenge of improving university access as an intractable problem. A major review of Australian higher education in 2008, for example, targets three groups most underrepresented in higher education – rural Australians, Indigenous Australians and people from low socioeconomic backgrounds – yet declares there is no easy or obvious solution to resolve this ‘challenge’ (Bradley et al, 2008, p 27). Elsewhere, regionality has been labelled the ‘hardest’ equity challenge to confront (Burnheim and Harvey, 2016), singling out regional and remote Australians as an especially intransigent equity group relative to all other targets of higher education policy.
This persistent under-representation is usually attributed to lower school completion rates, lower academic achievement and poorer employment options than their metropolitan peers (Burnheim and Harvey, 2016; Halsey, 2017). In this chapter, we adopt a different stance by interrogating the discourse of ‘under-representation’ itself. While ensuring better access to university is a key social justice concern, ‘under-representation’ is also tied to broader political and economic concerns that are often overlooked. Widening the participation of under-represented groups is a strategy for expansion (Sellar and Gale, 2011), with continued growth of the higher education sector heavily dependent on diversifying the student body. Relatedly, ‘under-representation’, as a marker of collective disadvantage in equity policy, positions certain kinds of youth against normative, idealized student subjectivities (Burke, 2012). Consequently, rural and remote Australians are largely seen as different and ‘Other’ in relation to higher education, shaped through the lens of the traditional metropolitan university student.
289 Helpline Services Before, During, and After the COVID-19 Pandemic: A Time Series Analysis
- Grace Cua, David Segovia, Jim Poole, Devyani Gore, Jennifer McGowan-Tomke, Alexa James, Ben Frank, Marc Atkins
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- Journal:
- Journal of Clinical and Translational Science / Volume 6 / Issue s1 / April 2022
- Published online by Cambridge University Press:
- 19 April 2022, p. 50
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OBJECTIVES/GOALS: This study examined patterns in helpline call data as the COVID-19 pandemic evolved including the impact of stay-at-home orders, relaxing of restrictive orders, and stages of vaccine uptake, as well as differences in call volume by Chicago neighborhood health indicators. METHODS/STUDY POPULATION: From November 1, 2018 to June 30, 2021, 56 NAMI-Chicago workers accepted 26,173 helpline calls from 9,374 individuals from 438 zip codes across northeastern Illinois with the majority of calls from high poverty Chicago communities. Descriptive and time series analyses examined patterns in call volume related to the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, Illinois Stay-at-Home Order, and Illinois reopening and vaccine uptake plan relative to comparable times the prior year. Health indicators from the Chicago Health Atlas (https://chicagohealthatlas.org/) were examined to determine patterns related to NAMI call volume and various health indicators at the zip code level. RESULTS/ANTICIPATED RESULTS: Time series analysis indicated the greatest number of calls occurred in 2020; specifically, there was a 212% increase in call volume and 331% increase in repeat callers (three or more calls per caller) during the first and second phase (March 20th to May 28th) of Illinois Stay-at-Home Order from 2019 to 2020. Analysis of the callers primary need indicated NAMI provided resources and referrals to people with unmet basic needs such as housing, food, and access to healthcare during the height of COVID-19 Pandemic in 2020. A series of ANOVAs indicated that individuals from Chicago zip codes with high levels of uninsured rates, poverty rates, households using SNAP benefits, and economic diversity called NAMI significantly more than those with low levels of these health indicators. DISCUSSION/SIGNIFICANCE: Helplines are a much-needed model to assess needs and implement services during public health crises, particularly in communities experiencing economic hardship and stress. Implications for behavioral health service needs both during and following the pandemic will be discussed.