The Article in Brief

Community-based Participatory Research in Practice Based Research Networks

John M. Westfall, MD, MPH , and colleagues

Background Community-based participatory research (CBPR) is aimed at making clinical research more relevant and valuable by involving patients and community members. CBPR is a cooperative process in which researchers and community members learn from each other. One goal of CBPR is to ground clinical research in real-life patient experience. This study looked at whether practice-based research networks (groups of clinicians who conduct research in doctors’ offices) are using CBPR in their research.

What This Study Found In a survey of US practice-based research networks, more than one half of the networks that responded had some mechanism to involve community members in their research. Several networks actively involve community members in generating research ideas, reviewing research plans, and interpreting and distributing research results. Many networks are planning to do more CBPR in the future.

Implications

• Community involvement may strengthen research in practice-based research networks.
• Involving the community of patients may help ensure that networks ask important clinical questions that matter to patients, are relevant to doctors, and are thoroughly studied in a research s