In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • Podcast Interview Transcript
  • Erin Kobetz, Bruce Armstrong, and Pamela Valera

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 Erin Kobetz interviews Bruce Armstrong and Pamela Valera, authors of “Academic Health Center–Community Justice Program Partnerships: Linking Men in the Justice System to Health Care.”

Beyond the Manuscript.

Click to hear audio

Erin Kobetz:

Hi. I am a big fan your manuscript, Academic Health Center-Community Justice Program

Partnerships:

Linking men in the justice system to health care, and I’m hoping that you could give our listeners an overview of your paper and the purpose of your research.

Bruce Armstrong:

Well, thank you for this opportunity to do that. We’d be happy to. Pam and I are colleagues at the Mailman School of Public Health. Our paper was intended to describe the work that we’ve been doing up at our medical center.

Columbia University Medical Center is a very large medical center in upper Manhattan that is composed of—like any medical center—a medical school, and a school of Public Health, and a school of Nursing and other schools, and a teaching hospital, New York Presbyterian Hospital. And our particular interest has been with a very vulnerable population, which is men that are involved in the justice system.

So our article basically describes our work and how we at the Medical Center, using the resources we have the clinical services of a couple of clinics especially, the Young Men’s Clinic and Project STAY—how we brought in the skills and the resources of clinicians from the hospital, and then faculty and students from the university to identify in the community very, very strong partners throughout Manhattan, not just in upper Manhattan, but reaching up into Brooklyn as well and other boroughs.

Across the spectrum of the justice system, so be it probation parole, re-entry, diversion programs, legal assistance programs like legal-aid, and how the different sectors—how we worked with the different sectors to try to collaborate with the ultimate goal of helping men who are involved in the justice system get better access to care. And what did in our work was really try to frame our work based on some critically important principals from community-based participatory research. [End Page 235]

Bruce Armstrong:

So things like sharing resources and showing trust and respect, and building that trust and respect over time. Recognizing the strengths of our partners and sharing the strengths that we had. Again, all with the ultimate goal of linking men to healthcare. But also to at the same time fulfill our mission as researchers and teachers. To do service-based research in the field, and to create opportunities for our students to apply some of the skills that they’re learning in the classroom.

And ultimately what we really hoped was that everybody, all the partners involved would gain from this. That our justice partners would have better access to care for their clients, our students would have more opportunities to practice, faculty would have opportunity to do some service-based research, and other kinds of research, and the hospital would benefit as well by increased utilization of clinics that really do provide some very critically needed primary care services to the vulnerable populations that we’re interested in serving.

Erin Kobetz:

Okay, I think that’s a beautiful segue to one of the questions that I had in reading your manuscript. Your commitment to community-based participatory research and the notion of leveraging institutional resources to better serve...

pdf

Share