Poster - #VH-61360 - Keywords: Self-advocacy Health coaching Health equity Patient engagement

Yes, we can trust each other: Building healthy relationships between patients and providers

Frederik Martin, Rev. Dr. Toni Dunbar, Vanessa Jackson, Libah Sheppard, Kassie Alexander, EdD, MSW, Patricia Mejia, Richard Ceballos, Debbie Adam, Rachel Willard-Grace, MPH
University of California, San Francisco

ABSTRACT:
Title: Yes, we can trust each other: building healthy relationships between patients and providers

Context and Objective: Why did you do your project?
During COVID, UCSF faculty, staff, and students met weekly with Tenderloin residents and NGOs. Out of that relationship came a community grand rounds that gave voice to the traumas Tenderloin residents have experienced within healthcare. This led to a connection between the Center for Excellence in Primary Care (CEPC) and community activists to co-develop a training to give patients the skills and confidence to create healthy relationships with their healthcare teams. There is momentum to develop sustainable partnerships between healthcare providers and community advocates, but little is known about how to create such partnerships. This poster sketches preliminary knowledge of how such partnerships can be formed.

Setting/Populations: Where and with whom did you do your project?
The advocacy training was developed in collaboration with community researcher, Freddy Martin, pastors from African American churches, and CEPC. The training was held at Faithful Fools, an NGO serving the Tenderloin. Attendees were staff and volunteers from NGOs serving the Tenderloin: Faithful Fools, Skywatchers, CodeTenderloin, The Healing Well, and Glide.

Intervention/Study Design: What did you do?
We co-designed curriculum, conducted a pilot training, invited participant feedback and created an evaluation plan to measure the impact of the pilot training and position ourselves to apply for extramural funding.

Outcomes/Results: What you learned from what you did
The CEPC team learned to:
• Trust the process for developing the curriculum collaboratively.
• Let go of institutionally-driven outcomes in favor of community-driven outcomes.
• Create equitable relationships: We all live here. We're all patients.
• Make space for participants to pick up and run with core skills, which became the foundation of learning.
• Put trust into practice during the workshop so that community members led with their knowledge/experience.

Community Collaborators learned:
• To trust the CEPC team with honoring our stories of lived experiences.
• About availability of funding, trusting that the money would come through
• To appropriate institutional practices (existing curriculum) for our benefit.
• To take ownership of the training

Conclusion
By stepping aside and inviting the community to lead, we built a more equitable, patient-centered healthcare process that truly listened. We learned that our well-being and ability to meet the needs of the community are bound up with the wisdom we encountered in our partners.