Nearly 100 people involved in public health from around the world made their way to Cornell for the sixth Fuse International Conference on Knowledge Exchange in Public Health. The conference, held June 11 and 12 at the College of Veterinary Medicine and hosted by the Bronfenbrenner Center for Translational Research, was an opportunity for scholars, policymakers, community-based organizations, and the public to come together and engage in discussions around public health research and how to engage the public with that research.
“The fact that this is an international conference means we get so many different points of view on public health research and community engagement,” said Amanda Purington Drake, lead organizer of the conference and director of ACT for Youth in the Bronfenbrenner Center for Translational Research.
The conference included sessions that touched on public health research topics, including oral presentations, poster presentations, plenary panels, and group discussions in unique formats.
Three keynote speakers highlighted the conference, each presenting a different approach on engaging the public in public health. Johanne Morne, the Executive Deputy Commissioner for the New York State Department of Health, kicked off the conference with a discussion on New York State’s efforts to engage the public on health issues including health care inequities and working in communities. Morne said not everyone has the same starting point or the same advantages, but everyone deserves an opportunity to get the best health outcomes. She urged authenticity when working in communities.
Johanne Morne, executive deputy commissioner of the New York State Department of Health speaks during the Fuse International Conference on Knowledge Exchange in Public Health.
“Trust is huge,” she said. “Once you lose trust, it’s not impossible to get it back, but it takes a tremendous amount of work to get it back.”
Morne also touched on the importance of researchers understanding the lived experiences of people in communities.
“A lot of times researchers come into communities and are shocked by what they hear and don’t consider the level of trauma individuals may have, [and learning] the historic foundational premises of why people are where they are today.”
Jeremy Taylor, director of public voice for the National Institute of Health and Care Research (NIHR), the British government’s major funder of clinical, public health, social care and translational research, discussed the importance of diversity in the research workforce and the communities with which they partner. Taylor said NIHR supports health research in the UK and other countries, all with diverse populations and the workforce needs to represent the communities they work with more closely.
“We are acutely aware that we need to do more to have people from other backgrounds in the research field,” Taylor said.
Subhash Chandir, left, with Amanda Purington Drake, right, during the Fuse International Conference on Knowledge Exchange in Public Health.
NIHR plays an important role in research dissemination. Taylor said there is much effort to make sure its research findings are accessible and easy to understand and wants to replicate those efforts with researchers the NIHR funds.
“We have a number of publication channels, we go to where our audiences are,” Taylor said. “We are thinking about how to incentivize dissemination of knowledge for those we fund.”
The final keynote address, from Subash Chandir, a founding director of IRD Global, focused on an effort to bring healthcare to underserved areas in Pakistan, through the Lady Heath Workers (LHW) program. The program trained women to be first point of contact for health services in these areas, by visiting households to provide basic services and suggest other available health services depending on need. While the program improved the health outcomes of people living in these underserved areas, the morale of workers was low. Many felt unappreciated, overworked, and underpaid, and harassment through gender discrimination was common.
To combat this, researchers retooled the LHW training using a humanities-based curriculum. With two cohorts in different areas of Pakistan, the training focused on creating a sense of purpose, an increased sense of self-worth and joy, and positioning the role as one of healer, commonly found in South Asian literature, as a way of establishing the LHW’s importance in the community.
The results were positive: sense of purpose increased, training attendance improved (98%), and LHWs were more engaged.
“No other training would have 98% attendance, no other training would have someone speaking three times every day,” Chandir said. “They would get up each day wanting to go to this training.”
This edition of the Fuse conference was the first to be held in the U.S. Fuse is the Center for Translational Research in Public Health and is a collaboration between six universities in the UK.
