Problems related to health and health care are multifactorial and complex and require innovative solutions. In this episode of HealthConnections, Dr. Carole Myers is joined by Dr. Kristi Gordon, Associate Dean for Community Engagement for the University of Tennessee Colleges of Education, Health, and Human Sciences and Social Work. Dr. Gordon describes an exciting research/practice partnership to address challenging health problems while engaging community professionals and members, students, and faculty.
WUOT’s Carole Myers: Dr Gordon. Let's jump right in. You have a vision for how a university can be relevant in addressing contemporary social problems. What's your vision?
Kristina Gordon: I think my vision overlaps a lot with the vision of the university at large. Our mission is three things. One is discovery, so to create new knowledge. The other is to transmit that knowledge to students and then also do a process of what we call community engagement, and just to work with the communities around us to make their lives better. The really fun thing that I'm assigned to do is to really work on that community engagement piece, and to make sure that the university is partnering with the community to make sure that they have a voice in the work that we do and the outcomes that we generate, and then also so that they can actually use the work that we do. So this partnership with Cherokee is really designed to make that happen and then become a model for how to do that as well for other people who want to do it.
So we think that if we get this right, it will be replicable and then the expectation is we will make things better here in the community where we live?
Absolutely because we have so many big problems we need to solve and we can't. Nobody can do it alone. No one agency can do it alone. The university can't do it alone. So we can build better partnerships and stronger partnerships, we're going to have much better work.
Let's circle back to this idea that the societal problems that we face are just incredibly complex to understand, but also complex to solve. Could you say more about that?
There's this idea, if we think about it like the opioid abuse issue, or how people deal with climate change or how people deal with inequities in healthcare, those are all major issues that we're facing, and they're known as what we call wicked problems. And wicked problems are problems that really no one discipline or one kind of organization can solve. And if you do it with just one organization, it's almost like pulling on a string, and it gets tighter on the other side with a big knot. So you need everybody working together to untie that knot and help address the wicked problem with better solutions. And so the university's great because we can bring together all these multidisciplinary perspectives. But we really also need the community perspective, because they're the boots on the ground people that are doing the work. They understand what folks are up against. They understand how things work, sort of in the real world. And they also have a sense of what solutions will work, what can be actually implemented and be practical. And so we need that information from the very, very beginning, so that what we design is useful.
Well no longer is it “Hi, I'm from the University, and I'm here to help.” It’s ‘how can we help each other’ and we have high expectations for the effect of that.
Exactly. There's a lot of research and just a lot of evidence that when we work together that way, we come up with better solutions.
Let's look a little bit at what you specifically are doing to change the work in the community and I suppose there has to be some changes here at UT.
Yes, absolutely. Because traditionally, we haven't been trained as academics to do it that way, and so trying to change that is challenging, but it's really exciting. A lot of great things are happening, one of which is the university has systematically partnered with Cherokee Health Systems to really develop a shared strategic vision around research and training, and so, kind of coming off of that vision, College of Education, Health and Human Sciences and the College of Social Work have partnered to create a place-based engagement site where we're running training programs, so students are getting hands on training with Cherokee patients, and with oversight and input from Cherokee staff, and we have a whole collection of multidisciplinary research teams developing research projects with Cherokee staff that will help answer some issues that they're having and also provide information for larger community about how to do this kind of work. So that part's really exciting to watch.
Dr. Gordon, I've read that we produce a lot of good research, but very little of it is actually utilized or translated into practice. How does your project help to address that challenge? You're doing research together, but what goes on afterwards?
Yes, exactly. Well, the fun thing is, we got funding from the William T Grant Foundation to develop something called an implementation science training program. And that program is bringing the Cherokee staff together with faculty and students so that they learn how to co create, generate research questions together, co create research projects together. And the outcome of these projects will be directly useful in the Cherokee Health System, but also, again, yield information and discovery for the wider healthcare community about how to adapt research in a useful practice.
