Podcast Interview Transcript
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In each volume of the Journal, the editors select one article for our Beyond the Manuscript post-study interview with the authors. Beyond the Manuscript provides the authors the opportunity to tell listeners what they would want to know about the project beyond what went into the final manuscript. The associate editors who handled the articles conduct our Beyond the Manuscript interviews. This edition of Beyond the Manuscript features Mary Oneha and Joan Dodgson authors of Lessons Learned: Refining the Research Infrastructure at Community Health Centers, and PCHP Associate Editor Haera Han.
Dr. Oneha, thank you for your time to talk to us today and we have Dr. Dodgson who co-authored this paper also. I’m so glad that we have both authors which I think really shows the great community academic partnership that the team was able to build over the years. So Dr. Oneha, to give our audience an orientation to your paper, I was wondering if you could please provide a brief summary of the paper, perhaps highlighting its purpose and the main points you describe in the paper?
The main point of the paper was to help describe some of the lessons that we learned after conducting our multiyear study at a community health center. We did this study in partnership with academic faculty from Arizona State University. The main point was to then share some of the lessons that we learned from this experience, which we categorized into three areas of: infrastructure, human resources and recruitment. The team at the community health center and the academic faculty have worked together for quite a while on other research studies.
Although it is in brief manner, the background of your paper, but tell us about how the partnership was started. There seems to have been quite a number of projects even before this R21 project began that the team actually worked on over the years.
Dr. Dodgson was faculty at the University of Hawaii several years ago and she had approached us with being interested in pregnant women and perinatal health. And so as a health center we were also interested in that population and in doing research with that population. Studies began from that point in looking at breastfeeding and understanding what influences women to breastfeed or not to breastfeed. We also did a study looking at PTSD in pregnant women what were some of the factors related to PTSD.
The studies that we did and the findings that we received from those studies then evolved to doing this R21 study. This study has evolved to another study that we are also both currently involved in at Waianae Coast Comprehensive Health Center which was the focus of this current paper and at Waimānalo Health Center which is the health center that I am currently at. Both health centers serve primarily a Native Hawaiian population. [End Page 67]
That’s really exciting because apparently the partnership was there even before the project began and there has been a subsequent study that was resulting from the R21 project also. So I was wondering how the community initially received plans to conduct the research described in the article because I think the article highlights some of interesting implementation processes that were mainly led by the community partner rather than the economic partner. So if you could please describe it, that would be wonderful.
That’s a good question and I think I should’ve explained from your prior question. Dr. Dodgson came to us with an idea and I think for communities we prefer that researchers come to us with an idea and something that’s also a priority and of interest to the community and to the health center. So she had come to us with an idea and she was very open to sitting down and just discussing what’s going on in our community health center. These are some of the challenges, these are some of the things that’s she’s interested in pursuing. So we were able to develop a...
