Podcast Interview Transcript
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Welcome to Progress in Community Health Partnerships’ latest episode of our Beyond the Manuscript podcast. 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 Editor who handles the featured article conducts our Beyond the Manuscript interview. In this episode of Beyond the Manuscript, Associate Editor Michael Yonas interviews Brett Ives and Jessica Hughson-Andrade, authors of “Vision Voice: A Multimedia Exploration of Diabetes and Vision Loss in East Harlem.”
Hey, Jessica and Brett, thanks so much for the opportunity to talk and connect and learn more about your work. It’s really a pleasure to talk to you more. With regard to the submission and the study that you guys presented in PCHP, I was wondering if you could just give us a little bit of background about the project and about your study and the work.
Great. Thanks, Michael, for speaking with us today. This work comes out of a five-year project funded by CDC as the Community Academic Coalition based at Mount Sinai in East Harlem. And it was called Communities IMPACT Diabetes Center, which sought to reduce health disparities in East Harlem.
A little bit about me—I’m a nurse practitioner and a diabetes educator. I most recently worked at Mount Sinai and became involved in this Community Academic Coalition. As a diabetes educator, I was not seeing a lot of material presented that really highlighted people’s narratives— elements that would really connect and resonate with individuals and potentially mobilize communities. So that’s part of the reason I became involved in the Vision Voice Project.
A little bit of background about East and Central Harlem—they’re very vibrant communities culturally, and yet they shoulder a large health burden, particularly of diabetes and its complications. In East Harlem and Central Harlem, one in six adults has diabetes and one in three has high blood pressure. So, in turn, many people suffer the effects of diminished vision function and vision impairment.
In fact, in a recent survey that Communities IMPACT Diabetes Center ran along with our community partner, Lighthouse International, it was found that nearly half of people—among older adults—half of people reported difficulty recognizing the faces of family across a medium sized room and had difficulty reading regular sized print, and that includes medication labels. And this was all because of problems with vision function. [End Page 345]
So, to address this issue, the Coalition launched multiple initiatives on vision health, and one component of this campaign was the Vision Voice Project, which is the research study that we’ll be talking about today. Vision Voice served as a qualitative needs assessment. It was formative research to understand people’s experiences with difficulty with vision function and how that related to managing their chronic illnesses. And this is an area that, initially, the Coalition did not know a lot about.
So, Jessica has a little bit more information on the distinction between—I keep saying low vision, problems with vision function. So what’s the difference between low vision function and legal blindness or blindness?
And I’m Jessica Hughson-Andrade. At the time of the project I worked for Lighthouse International as the outreach coordinator and was very close to the project and working with Communities IMPACT. So low vision is typically defined, or broadly defined, as a vision loss that cannot be corrected through traditional means such as eyeglasses or contact lenses.
And this vision loss will impair someone’s daily function, so a little bit what Brett mentioned— unable to read medication labels, unable to basically live independently. People may have trouble recognizing faces. People may have trouble crossing the street and doing things on their own. And over time, the rates of low vision and blindness increase with age dramatically. Certainly from...
