Community Health Worker Partnership
The SMADRC has been honored to partner with the local community health workers (promotores) from the Latinx community in San Diego County. Their expertise, connections, and valuable insights about their unique communities have informed many of our outreach, recruitment, and engagement activities and offerings.
We have valued the opportunity to work alongside these valued professionals to offer free Spanish memory screening services in the community for older adults, free Spanish language quality of life programs to support persons living with memory disorders and their care partners, and training and education programming about Alzheimer's and related dementias in Spanish.
Our efforts to engage the Latinx community in research studies about brain aging, Alzheimer's disease, and related dementias, and caregiving have been greatly enhanced by the partnership with our community health worker partners.
We have heard the request from our partners to provide a formalized training curriculum and certification for community health workers partnering with our research center, and we have successfully trained a team of UC San Diego, SMADRC Research Promotoras about the principles of ethical research along with knowledge about Alzheimer's and related dementias and the procedures and programs offered at our SMADRC.
All of our the SMADRC Research Promotoras have received certification in the BRIC modules, a global resource for Building Research Integrity and Capacity. These modules increase research literacy and capacity among community members, including Promotores de Salud/ Community Health Workers, who assist with the design and implementation of health-related research.