Lessons Learned From a Program to Reduce Diabetes Risk Among Low-Income Hispanic Women in a Community Health Clinic

This report describes the methodology used to develop and implement De Por Vida, the cultural adaptations made, the community–academic partnership formed to carry out this program, and the barriers and challenges encountered through the implementation process.MethodsOur goal was to translate the DPP and Look AHEAD programs into an intervention to prevent diabetes and reduce diabetes complications among high-risk Hispanic women at a federally qualified health center in Hillsboro, Oregon, where more than half of clinic patients are Spanish-speaking, and nearly all live in poverty. This randomized clinical trial targeted overweight Spanish-speaking women at risk for, or diagnosed with, type 2 diabetes. We developed a 12-month behavioral diabetes risk-reduction intervention that was responsive to the cultural practices of the Hispanic population and that could be implemented in low-income clinical settings. Study planning and implementation involved close collaboration among the clinic leadership, a research team from the Kaiser Permanente Center for Health Research, and Arizona State University.DiscussionCreating a fully informed partnership between research and clinical institutions is the first step in successful cooperative research projects. The adoption of a bidirectional, rather than a top-down, approach to communication between researchers and health-care providers, and between clinic management and the clinic frontline staff, gave the research study team crucial inform...
Source: Frontiers in Endocrinology - Category: Endocrinology Source Type: research