Description
On December 6, 2021, National Institutes of Health’s (NIH) National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI) held a virtual workshop to enhance the importance of truthfulness, transparency, and trustworthiness in biomedical research and identify gaps to establish trusted partnerships in community-based participatory research. The 2021 Saunders-Watkins Virtual Workshop: Building Trust in "Community-Engaged" Research was free, open to the public, and was recorded.
Background
This year’s Saunders-Watkins workshop brought together researchers, health care providers, community partners, and federal, state, and local government officials and other stakeholders to discuss the current evidence and future research and practice needs to build trust in community-engaged research to tackle health inequities, including those revealed during the COVID-19 pandemic. Trust is critical in biomedical research, especially clinical trial recruitment of minority populations. A trusted and transparent process will enhance the overall design, conduct, and oversight of clinical research/trials and eventually benefit all populations. Meanwhile, misinformation, ineffective communication, unconscious bias, and limited community engagement may contribute to mistrust.
Workshop Objectives
Workshop participants were instructed not to develop recommendations for NIH but to identify gaps and opportunities in research, training, and education; to identify critical challenges and questions to build trust in community-engaged research; and to share lessons from past models of building community trust—both successes and failures.
Summary of Discussions
On December 6, 2021, experts met to highlight lessons learned, effective strategies, research questions, and future directions pertaining to building trust in community-engaged research. This year’s workshop featured a “fireside chat” between Dr. Marcella Nunez-Smith, an associate professor of internal medicine, public health, and management at Yale, and Dr. George A. Mensah, of NHLBI. Dr. Nunez-Smith was recently appointed to lead a presidential task force on COVID-19 and equity. Vaccine hesitancy, the disproportionate impact of COVID-19 on certain communities and populations, and other issues related to the pandemic have highlighted lessons about health equity and the roles of truth, trust, and transparency as they relate to community-engaged research and public health.
SESSION 1: The Importance of Truthfulness, Transparency, and Trustworthiness in Biomedical Research
In the first session of the workshop, leaders of community organizations that have partnered with biomedical researchers discussed how to build trust, truthfulness, and transparency in communities and community-engaged organizations and how to make research more responsive to community needs.
SESSION 2: Strategies to Establish Trusted Partnerships in Community-Based Participatory Research
In the second session, discussants considered how researchers and communities can develop research questions collaboratively to address both community health concerns and rigorous scientific review standards and how to manage community expectations about the timetable of research and how soon they might expect to see research-findings-based change.
SESSION 3: Sustaining Trust in Community-Engaged Research: Lessons From the COVID-19 Pandemic Response
The panelists in the third session were health disparities community-engaged researchers, many of whom have been involved with the NIH Community Engagement Alliance (CEAL) Against COVID-19. They discussed lessons learned from the COVID-19 pandemic about sustaining trust between researchers and communities.
SESSION 4: Nourishing the Next Generation of Community-Focused and Community-Trusted Researchers to Achieve Health Equity
In the final panel discussion, participants speculated about the future of community-engaged researchers and how the biomedical community can engender trust, use health equity lenses to increase community engagement, and incentivize this type of research.
Workshop Recording:
Contact Rashawn Jones at NHLBIWorkshopSupport@nih.gov to access the recording.
Agenda
Publication Plans
The workshop Co-Chairs, moderators, speakers, and other participants will develop a summarized report for publication in a peer-reviewed journal. The report will describe in more depth the discussions and research opportunities, including those under each session of the workshop.
Contact
For programmatic questions, contact Dr. Xinzhi Zhang at Xinzhi.Zhang@nih.gov. For logistical questions, contact Rashawn Jones at NHLBIWorkshopSupport@nih.gov.