Accepting the Passed Torch: A Vision for the Future Growth & Evolution of Progress in Community Health Partnerships

To our Readers:

On this past April Fool's Day, our team at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx, New York, received the honor of guiding Progress in Community Health Partnerships (PCHP) into the near future. Einstein's team consists of Nancy Glassman, MLS, MPH, and Racheline Habousha, MSLS, as the new Managing Editors, and me as Editor-in-Chief, succeeding Northwestern University Feinberg School of Public Health's Adela Mizrachi, MA, and Darius Tandon, PhD, respectively. Dr. Tandon succeeded PCHP's founding editor, Eric Bass, MD, MPH, at Johns Hopkins, and led the search committee from the editorial board that chose us.

PCHP was founded in 2006 and first published in Spring 2007. With brief occasional lapses, I have subscribed since Fall 2007, so I was very pleased in Fall 2017, when the PCHP Editorial Board as authors published a detailed review of the journal's first decade of publication¹ and a "Vision Forward."² Their two articles made our application to lead PCHP a straightforward matter of reading and responding to them rather than trying to review 10 volumes of 4 quarterly issues of 125 pages each (or approximately 5,000 pages).

First, PCHP has been pivotal in ensuring the rigor, vigor, and flourishing of the approach and fields of community-based participatory research (CBPR) and of community–academic partnerships. Second, PCHP has faithfully pursued its original mission and helped to establish the science of CBPR, health partnerships, and our field. Third, my own quick PubMed search under the MeSH term, "community–academic partnership," yielded 138 articles published from 2007 to 2017, with 40 (29%) appearing in PCHP; Health Promotion & Practice followed with nine and Ethnicity & Disease with six articles, demonstrating PCHP 's clear leadership in the field.

A DECADE OF HEALTH SYSTEM CHANGE FOR THE HISTORY BOOKS

However, much has changed radically in our field, as noted in the Editorial Board's review. What follows is only a partial list:

• • The passage and implementation of the Affordable Care Act, an unprecedented breakthrough that

  • ○ Allowed healthcare access to many uninsured;

  • ○ Created the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute;

  • ○ Expanded community-based, community health worker-based, and patient navigator-based public health programs; and

  • ○ Significantly shifted the terms of our long-standing national health debate.

• • The National Institute of Health Roadmap's Clinical and Translational Science Award initiative also began in 2006 and required community engagement.

  • ○ In their 2013 evaluation of the Clinical and Translational Science Award network, the Institute of Medicine (IOM) endorsed community engagement across the entire research spectrum.³

  • ○ More recently, the National Institute of Health's National Center for Advancing Translational Science modified "community" into "stakeholder" engagement.

• • The Center for Medicaid and Medicare Services launched the Delivery System Reform Incentive Program that in New York State has begun to reorganize the relationships between Community-Based Organizations, federally qualified health centers, substance abuse and mental health providers, and hospitals seeking to change the underlying social determinants of health to reduce unnecessary emergency department visits and hospitalizations for Medicaid patients, which absolutely begs for the scientific knowledge from the field of community- and stakeholder-engaged research.

• • Even the latest book from the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, What Matters: Investing in Results to Build Strong, Vibrant Communities,⁴ has half a dozen chapters on community health, including one on Medicaid and another entitled, "Investing in Health from the Ground Up: Building a Market for Healthy Neighborhoods."

I heartily agree with the Editorial Board recommendation that "the study of partnerships involved in research and improving public health should be expanded beyond the current focus on CBPR."¹ These examples illustrate the diversity of what we should be studying among community development, public health, and clinical partnerships.

HOW TO BETTER ADDRESS ETHICS IN COLLABORATIONS WITH COMMUNITIES

The "Bible" of research ethics, the National Commission on the Protection of Human Subjects of Biomedical and Behavioral Research's 1978 Belmont Report, has been criticized for "overemphasizing individual rights" and neglecting communities. For example, Levine et al.⁵ observed:

In each of its...