Institutional community engagement leader perspectives on supporting ethical community-engaged research

Over the last couple of decades, there has been a growing awareness of the value of community-engaged research (CEnR). Simultaneously, many academic institutions have established centralized support for CEnR. For example, dozens of academic medical centers in the United States receive National Institutes of Health (NIH)-funded Clinical and Translational Science Awards (CTSAs) and have embedded community engagement programs (CE) whose primary expertise and mission is to advance CEnR at their institutions.

As part of a larger interview study aiming to learn more about how institutional CE programs and HRPPs work together, we analyzed interviews with CE program leaders at academic medical centers that receive funding from the NIH CTSA program to identify barriers and strategies to conducting CEnR at their institutions, primarily focusing on the relationships with Institutional Review Boards (IRBs).

We identified three categories in the interviews: barriers and strategies vis-à-vis IRBs to address 1) CE/IRB relationships; 2) Understanding issues; and 3) Structural and resource issues.

CTSA CE program leaders have experience implementing solutions to common barriers to IRB review faced by CEnR researchers. The barriers they face in these three categories and the strategies they use to overcome them can provide helpful insights to others who hope to facilitate CEnR research at their institutions.