McGrath, C., Kennedy, M.-R., Gibson, A. et al. (3 more authors) (2023) World Cafés as a participatory approach to understanding research agendas in primary care with underserved communities: reflections, challenges and lessons learned. Research Involvement and Engagement, 9 (1). 101. ISSN 2056-7529
Abstract
Background
Certain communities are underserved by research, resulting in lower inclusion rates, under researched health issues and a lack of attention to how different communities respond to health interventions. Minoritised ethnic groups are often underserved by research and services. They experience health inequalities and face significant barriers to accessing health services. It is recognised that new approaches are needed to reach underserved communities and make research more relevant. The purpose of this work was to utilise World Cafés, a participatory method, to explore research agendas with diverse communities.
Methods
Two World Cafés were conducted as research agenda setting activities with individuals from minoritised ethnic communities in Bristol, UK. World Café 1 explored Black and Asian women’s perspectives about supporting mental health. World Café 2 with men from the Somali community, focused on prostate cancer. Community members co-developed the focus and questions of each World Café and were also instrumental in recruiting individuals to the sessions and facilitating discussions, including translation. Audio and written records were made of the discussions and from these key issues about each topic were identified, and a visual representation of the discussion was also generated. These were shared with participants to check for accuracy.
Results
Community members identified a range of issues that are important to them in relation to mental health and prostate cancer, including barriers to help seeking and accessing primary and secondary care, ideas for service improvements and a need for health information that is accessible and culturally relevant.
Conclusions
World Cafés are a flexible method that can be successfully adapted for research agenda setting with individuals from minoritised ethnic communities. The role of community members in co-developing the focus of sessions, recruiting community members and co-facilitating sessions is crucial to this success. The discussions at both World Cafés provided a rich insight into the experiences of participants in relation to the topics mental health and prostate cancer and identified issues that are important to these communities that will be followed-up with communities, researchers and clinicians to co-develop research and service improvement strategies.
Plain English Summary
People from minoritised ethnic groupsgroups can have difficulty getting health care. They may also be left out of health research. There is a need to include a more diverse group of people in health research. World Cafés are an accessible way to listen to people by getting them to talk to each other about different questions and topics.
We did this work to see if World Cafés are a helpful way to talk to people from minoritised ethnic groups about health. We wanted to learn what things are important to people around mental health and prostate cancer. We also wanted to see if designing and running the World Café with people from the same communities as people taking part in the World Cafés is a good way to do this. We worked together with people from racial and ethnic minorities to:
Choose questions and topics,
Ask people to take part
Get people talking and write down what was said
We learned that planning and running World Cafés with people from the same communities as the people taking part was very helpful. The people taking part in the World Cafés said that it can be difficult to get help and information about their health. They gave lots of reasons for this. They also had ideas to improve healthcare.
Now that we have this information, we will work with the people who took part in and helped run the World Cafés, along with, doctors and researchers to take their ideas for improvements forwards.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © 2023 The Author(s). Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecom‑ mons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated in a credit line to the data. |
Keywords: | Participatory approaches; Primary care; Public involvement; Research agendas; Underserved communities; World Cafés |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of Sheffield |
Academic Units: | The University of Sheffield > Faculty of Medicine, Dentistry and Health (Sheffield) > School of Medicine and Population Health |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Sheffield |
Date Deposited: | 19 Jan 2024 11:48 |
Last Modified: | 11 Oct 2024 11:45 |
Status: | Published |
Publisher: | Springer Science and Business Media LLC |
Refereed: | Yes |
Identification Number: | 10.1186/s40900-023-00509-3 |
Related URLs: | |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:207977 |