Community engagement in global health/public health is gaining increasing importance. In this paper published in BMC Medical Ethics, we focus on the need for metrics for evaluating community engagement practices in global health research.

Full text available: http://www.biomedcentral.com/1472-6939/16/44

Evaluating community engagement in global health research: the need for metrics

Kathleen M. MacQueen1*, Anant Bhan2, Janet Frohlich3, Jessica Holzer4, Jeremy Sugarman5 and the Ethics Working Group of the HIV Prevention Trials Network

*Corresponding author: Kathleen M MacQueen kmacqueen@fhi360.org

Author Affiliations

1Social and Behavioral Health Sciences, FHI 360, 359 Blackwell Street, Durham 27514, NC, USA

2Bioethics and Global Health, Bhopal/Pune, India

3Vulindlela Clinical Research Site, CAPRISA, University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban, South Africa

4Hofstra University, Hempstead, NY, USA

5Berman Institute of Bioethics, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, USA

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BMC Medical Ethics 2015, 16:44  doi:10.1186/s12910-015-0033-9

The electronic version of this article is the complete one and can be found online at:http://www.biomedcentral.com/1472-6939/16/44

Received: 12 January 2015

Accepted: 26 May 2015

Published: 1 July 2015

© 2015 MacQueen et al.

This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly credited. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated.

Abstract

Background

Community engagement in research has gained momentum as an approach to improving research, to helping ensure that community concerns are taken into account, and to informing ethical decision-making when research is conducted in contexts of vulnerability. However, guidelines and scholarship regarding community engagement are arguably unsettled, making it difficult to implement and evaluate.

Discussion

We describe normative guidelines on community engagement that have been offered by national and international bodies in the context of HIV-related research, which set the stage for similar work in other health related research. Next, we review the scholarly literature regarding community engagement, outlining the diverse ethical goals ascribed to it. We then discuss practical guidelines that have been issued regarding community engagement. There is a lack of consensus regarding the ethical goals and approaches for community engagement, and an associated lack of indicators and metrics for evaluating success in achieving stated goals. To address these gaps we outline a framework for developing indicators for evaluating the contribution of community engagement to ethical goals in health research.

Summary

There is a critical need to enhance efforts in evaluating community engagement to ensure that the work on the ground reflects the intentions expressed in the guidelines, and to investigate the contribution of specific community engagement practices for making research responsive to community needs and concerns. Evaluation mechanisms should be built into community engagement practices to guide best practices in community engagement and their replication across diverse health research settings.

Keywords: Research ethics; Community engagement; Participatory research; Global health; Evaluation; Metrics

HIFA profile: Anant Bhan is a Researcher at SRC, India. Professional interests: Global health, public health, bioethics. dranantbhan AT gmail.com