SCC-CIVIC-PG Track B: Community-Based Research meets Systems Approach: Closing the Loop on Child Lead Poisoning

University Of Notre Dame, Notre Dame IN

Investigators

Abstract

Even in communities where lead (Pb) exposure pathways are well understood, there are significant barriers to getting resources to the most affected individuals. These disparities in access to healthcare lead to a generational disadvantage as the households that face lead poisoning are disproportionately composed of racial minorities that live in low-income neighborhoods. This CIVIC research is at the intersection of community-based research and technology-driven frameworks. The goal of this research is to understand how to close communication gaps among households, healthcare providers, and policymakers. This has the potential to increase access to in-time health care, and enables quick and aggressive interventions via an app to be developed to tie all relevant parties together to improve the coordination of care to prevent child lead poisoning. The initial target community is St. Joseph County, Indiana. The research engages all relevant stakeholders in the process of lead poisoning diagnosis, intervention, and remediation/abatement. Broader impacts of the work include better health outcomes and less lead poisoning in children from low-income neighborhoods as well as engagement and training of engineering and chemistry undergraduate students. Students will be involved in developing accessible educational materials to inform households about the risks of lead exposure, especially in children, with the goal of helping community members identify and pursue lead assessment/abatement resources to protect the health of their loved ones. Student teams involved in the Stage 1 and follow-on Stage 2 program, if funded, will receive experiential learning opportunities and work with communities to translate community challenges into problem statements and help with the implementation of possible solutions. Research findings and developed technologies and informational materials will be scalable to other localities in the US and elsewhere with high soil and home lead concentrations. Although Community-Based Participatory Research encourages multidisciplinary case review teams to evaluate the effectiveness of interventions, an understanding of the relationship between individual, community, provider, and system factors is presently underexplored. This prevents the critical insight necessary to create risk reduction strategies, improve clinical pathways, and eliminate barriers to care. Through the CIVIC Stage 1 planning period, an interdisciplinary and multi stakeholder group of community members, health providers, researchers, and policymakers will be convened to understand the targeted community and the overlapping roles and responsibilities that each group has in closing the loop of lead detection in children and connecting households to resources that provide abatement interventions. These design thinking sessions and discussions will inform a framework for deploying community health workers, who work directly with impacted communities, and provide informational and technological solutions in the form of an app which will be co-designed by the community and university researchers as part of the pilot project. In the following Stage 2 project, the app and identified solutions will be deployed and evaluated alongside the performance of a previously developed, low-cost, lead, screening kit through a pilot program. The techno-sociological framework will enable a greater understanding about if and how the voices of marginalized patients are being heard, understood, and acted upon. This project is in response to the Civic Innovation Challenge program—Track B. Bridging the gap between essential resources and services & community needs—and is a collaboration between NSF, the Department of Homeland Security, and the Department of Energy. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.