WSU health sciences schools strengthen community engagement through research, clinical practice – Today@Wayne

When Wayne State University nursing professor Cynthera McNeill, DNP, was awarded a five-year training grant last year to improve geriatric care in Detroit and around the state, she decided to move the classroom to the community.  

Leading an interprofessional team of faculty and students from across Wayne State’s three health sciences schools — the College of Nursing, the School of Medicine and the Eugene Applebaum College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences — McNeill developed the Applied Gerontology Research and Education to Eliminate Disparities (AGREED) Gerontology Workforce Program, a community-based, interdisciplinary collaborative that has become a showcase for how Wayne State blends research, teamwork, community-engagement and innovation to empower health in the city as part of its Prosperity Agenda. 

Although it is one of the newer initiatives that Wayne State has undertaken in recent years to improve the quality of health and life in Detroit, the College of Nursing-led AGREED effort has already begun to yield some impressive results. For instance, still in its first year, the grant-funded effort has already trained nearly 90 community health workers on how to assist the state’s elderly population in healthy living. About 15 WSU graduate students have received training through the program, and nearly 30 undergraduate students have gotten experience working at long-term care facilities alongside Wayne State faculty. The program even created a geriatric specialist certificate, in collaboration with the WSU Community Health Worker Academy, for those who’ve completed the training. 

“AGREED serves as an outstanding illustration of how Wayne State uses collaboration and innovation to foster transformative excellence in health care and to enhance quality of life for our communities,” said Dr. Bernard J. Costello, WSU’s senior vice president for health affairs.

“Universities countrywide look to Wayne State University as an exemplar in community-engaged research. People here are exceptionally good at this. Our researchers take the time to build relationships within our community and rely on community members to help determine which problems to solve and how. This is not charity work — it’s a recognition of the unique expertise and perspective that a community has within it. It’s an approach that leads to better research and more impactful outcomes.”

Moreover, the AGREED team also has helped improve care at facilities like the Rosa Parks Geriatric Clinic and the Hartford Nursing Home and provided resources for the countless informal caregivers who tend to the health and lives of aging friends and relatives. 

“This is not just research,” McNeill said. “This is applied techniques to improve the quality of life of the citizens living in this area. At Wayne State, it’s our responsibility to take these opportunities to have a hands-on, grassroots, boots-on-the-ground approach to impacting the lives of caregivers, patients, direct care staff and health care providers.” 

Teaching research 

As Michigan’s sole urban Carnegie R1 research institution, Wayne State maintains the same commitment to collaboration and service in each of its health sciences schools — and honors this commitment by remaining deeply embedded in the local community.  

At the Wayne State School of Medicine, Hayley Thompson, Ph.D., leads the three-year-old WSU Center for Health and Community Knowledge in Urban Populations (CHeCK-UP), a transdisciplinary effort that works across Wayne State’s schools, colleges and departments to identify both barriers and bridges to health equity in the region.   

Thompson, a professor of oncology who also helps lead the Office of Community Outreach and Engagement at the Barbara Ann Karmanos Cancer Institute, has been intimately involved with cancer research in Detroit and with the Community Health Scholars Program, a far-reaching effort to better educate local communities about the research process and encourage them to engage directly alongside researchers.

“We talk about community-based engagement and community-based participatory research,” Thompson explained. “And we talk a lot about power and privilege in the context of community-academic research partnerships. We talk about institutional review boards and research ethics and the importance of protecting human participants in research.”

Since establishing the Community Health Scholars Program in 2022, Thompson and her team have trained 34 community members from a wide variety of backgrounds — from public health nurses to church administrators — to be partners and leaders in research through roles such as advisory board member, consultant and community co-investigator for specific research studies.

“A program like this is essential to the work if we want to advance community-engaged research in the health space,” Thompson said. “We want to involve community members in research in different ways. It is our duty to make sure that they’re prepared to participate in the work. As scientists, we have jargon; we talk about concepts that people who don’t have the same background or training aren’t familiar with. That can create distance when you are trying to partner with someone who doesn’t have the same vocabulary as you do. We wanted to give people tools, skills, language and get them familiar with key concepts so they would feel comfortable talking to researchers and feel confident partnering with researchers.”

A prescription for success 

At the Eugene Applebaum College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences, pharmacy faculty and studentpharmacists lead their own community-based programming while also playing vital roles in other health sciences schools’ initiatives. In 2022, student pharmacist, Shannon Habba, at EACPHS won a grant that allowed students to join with Meijer Pharmacy in Livonia to initiate mental health screenings at the location. Students hosted 12 different screening events, signing up a total of 70 participants from the community who sat with EACPHS students to assess their mental health and to learn how to address issues such as depression.

“We were providing them with resources, we were connecting them to care, or we were just giving them resources to take with them,” explained EACPHS Assistant Professor Brittany Stewart, RD, Pharm.D., who oversaw the student effort. “A lot of people would stop and want to know something for a family member if they needed something. The program was a big success. Seventy people is a lot of people to get to sign up for mental health screening at one neighborhood pharmacy.” 

The program did so well, in fact, that it has since expanded to now include student pharmacists from the University of Michigan and Ferris State University. 

“This project is statewide now,” said Stewart. “The three schools of pharmacy, we’re working together and we’re going to now level up the project. We’re going to implement the same mental health screenings, but we’re going to do it across the state. We will work from the same one we did here in Livonia, and we’re also going to have sites in Ypsilanti and Big Rapids. But at the time we initially did it, there were no other projects like this run by student pharmacists. Wayne State was first.” 

EACPHS has also made an impact working with the other health sciences units. For example, pharmacy faculty works closely with McNeill on the AGREED training program and can also be found riding with the groundbreaking Wayne Health Mobile Units, a fleet of specially outfitted vans and one RV that travel the city and state providing a plethora of services — from COVID vaccinations to blood pressure screenings — to thousands of patients each year. 

EACPHS pharmacy faculty and students have collaborated with the Wayne Health Mobile Unit physicians, nurses, pharmacists and other staff to kick off a smoking cessation program that they ran through the Wayne Health Mobile Unit effort.

Under the ACHIEVE-Cessation program, Detroit community participants can visit a Wayne Health Mobile Unit to sign up for pharmacist visits via telehealth where they can receive counseling and prescription medicine to help them quit smoking cigarettes or e-cigarettes.  In two years, the program has enrolled 30 participants and, in keeping with WSU’s community engagement mission, is designed to consider a broad spectrum of variables that influence the choice to smoke — because the reality of health challenges is that they are impacted by several factors that aren’t exclusively medical in nature. 

“We looked at smoking, but we also looked at social determinants of health,” Stewart, the program’s project investigator, said. “We’ve found out a lot of things about their transportation issues, housing, food. We looked at behavioral factors. What is it that makes people want to quit smoking? Or why do they struggle to quit smoking? What are some of their motivating things in life that make them want to stop smoking? It’s been a great program, and it’s always meaningful to us when we can take the work that we do to help our Detroit community.”