Community Engagement
To support two-way, ongoing communication and sharing of research ideas between and among researchers, clinicians, communities, and policy-makers, the Community Engagement component of the UW Institute for Clinical and Translational Research (ICTR-CAP) is working to transform the relationship between UW and the State of Wisconsin to engage researchers with community-based clinicians, community representatives, and policy-makers in developing new strategies to support clinical and translational research.
The Community Engagement component focuses on building practice- and community-based infrastructure to:
- support community clinicians, community representatives, and policy-makers as research and education partners; and
- enhance creative interaction and communication with academic investigators.
Our efforts build on existing strengths of the University of Wisconsin to support researchers, community-based clinicians, community-based organizations, and policy-makers to engage in mutually beneficial partnerships by:
- Building capacity to support community-based clinicians to engage in research within a statewide network. The primary mechanism for a clinical practice to participate in a research project is through the Wisconsin Research and Education Network (WREN), a statewide, practice-based research network of over 130 primary care clinicians and academic researchers. For more information on WREN, its research projects and how to get involved, please refer to WREN’s website.
- Building an information gathering, research facilitation and dissemination network to encourage the engagement of researchers with communities throughout the State of Wisconsin. The Institute provided resources to create the Community Health Connections program to develop and sustain a statewide, regionally-based infrastructure to promote ideas and community-based projects to influence Type 2 translational research being done at the University and in communities across the state.
- Increasing the engagement of UW researchers in defining the evidence base for health policy decisions that affect communities and population health. The Evidence Based Health Policy Project engages University of Wisconsin researchers with private and public sector policy-makers to provide timely, non-partisan and high quality information for evidence-based decision-making.
